Universal killed Daveed Diggs’ Twister sequel for obvious “shady” reasons
Daveed Diggs implies the Twister sequel took so long because Universal didn’t want a movie with “all Black and Brown storm chasers”
First of all, Daveed Diggs’ wrote a Twister sequel? Thomas Jefferson himself packing up “Dorothy 2” into a flatbed for a trip around tornado alley with Helen Hunt? It almost happened, says Diggs, until Universal killed the project for “shady” reasons.
But let’s back up. First, we need to set the table. By now, we’re all well aware that Universal is moving full steam ahead with Twisters, which will inevitably be titled one of the following: Twoster, Twi2ter, Toaster, Twister: Origins, Twister: Retribution, The Twister, or simply Twister. The project has been in development hell ever since audiences saw that infamous CGI cow fly across the screen in a disturbing bit of digital animal cruelty. But in 2021, appearing on Watch What Happens Live!, original Finger-of-God-puller Helen Hunt said she wanted to direct a sequel featuring “all Black and Brown storm chasers” and “they wouldn’t do it.”
“We could barely get a meeting,” she said in 2021. “And this is in June of 2020, when it was all about diversity. And it would have been so cool,” she continued. “There was a HBCU [historically Black college and university] where we wanted it to take place, and a rocket science club, and in this one, they shoot the rockets into the tornado. It was going to be so cool.”
Hunt revealed that the project was to be written by Blindspotting co-writers Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal. As we know from history, Hunt never made the movie, and the implied reasoning is about as predictable as any other shitty thing this industry pulls.
“Oh man, I’m not going to get into it mostly because I’m probably going to misremember things,” Diggs told Insider on Tuesday. “But all I’ll say is there was an opportunity where we were talking about that, and it didn’t happen, and the reasons that it didn’t happen are potentially shady.”
Diggs probably didn’t need to add the next part because anyone who has ever stepped foot in the United States knows why Hollywood wouldn’t go for a movie about Black and Brown storm chasers (racism). Though, Diggs is much more diplomatic than the netizens of the A.V. Club and puts it far too nice of terms: “But shady in the way that we know the industry is shady.”
None of this is surprising, except for the fact that Daveed Diggs was writing a Twister sequel. That was to be his Blindspotting follow-up. What a weird fucking industry? Anyway, Twister 2 will be helmed by Minari director Lee Isaac Chung.