It's Easy To See How Helen Hunt Could Have Fit Into Twisters

(This article contains major spoilers for "Twisters," so beware.)

While it seems like "Twisters" is a sequel to the hit natural disaster action drama "Twister" from 1996, it's actually more of a reboot. In fact, it even borders on being a remake. There are no legacy characters returning in "Twisters," and there are no references to the events of the first movie. The closest "Twisters" comes to carrying elements over from the original "Twister" is the use of an old "Dorothy" machine used to release censors into tornadoes for gathering weather data. But beyond that, this is a follow-up with all-new characters in a familiar story about two competing teams of storm chasers, each of them in it for different reasons.

Daisy Edgar-Jones ("Where the Crawdads Sing") takes the lead as Kate, a storm chaser aspiring to figure out how to collapse a tornado by manipulating the weather conditions that fuel it. But when one of her attempts brings her face to face with a powerful EF5 tornado near home hometown in Oklahoma, three of her fellow chasers (including one that she loves dearly) end up dead, and she takes a desk job at a New York City weather center, far away from the dangerous area known as Tornado Alley. Of course, Kate ends up called back into action by her friend Javi (Anthony Ramos), whose investors have provided him with the funds to pay for state-of-the-art radar technology that allow them to create the most detailed model of an active tornado ever. Back to Tornado Alley we go!

Meanwhile, another storm chaser named Tyler (Glen Powell), who calls himself a tornado wrangler, is racking up YouTube views by pulling off risky stunts inside tornadoes. With a customized truck that can drill into the ground and a team equipped with a bunch of cool gadgets, he drives straight into tornadoes to do things like launch fireworks up into the funnel, and he sells t-shirts and more with his cartoon face on them. But he's not just some redneck daredevil — he also has extensive and legitimate meteorological education. 

With the rivalry between these two teams echoing the original "Twister," as illustrated in the "Twisters" trailers, it's a wonder that there isn't a more direct line to the blockbuster predecessor. However, once you've seen the movie, it's clear how Helen Hunt could have fit into the film if the studio would have brought her back. 

In "Twisters," Kate has an impressive intuition when it comes to chasing storms. By merely observing various weather elements, be it in person or on a radar, she has incredible instincts about which storms will yield the most satisfying results for collecting helpful data. Even the film's score utilizes a graceful piano theme when Kate starts honing in on a storm's traits to determine where the tornado is going to form and shift. It's like she has tornado vision.

In that way, she's very much like the character played by Bill Paxton (who had a "Twister" sequel idea of his own at one point). There's even a moment when she gets a line that calls back to his character, also named Bill. In the original "Twister," Bill meets up with Helen Hunt's character Jo in order to get their divorce papers signed. While there, Jo's team keeps welcoming Bill back to the storm chasing scene, prompting him to say, "I'm not back!" more than a couple times. In "Twisters," after Kate's first foray back into the world of storm chasing, Javi mentions that it's good to have her back, and she says, "I'm not back."

Warner Bros / Universal

However, Kate's ambitions also make her similar to Jo. In the original "Twister," Jo carries the childhood trauma of seeing her father sucked into a tornado, and it fuels her passion for giving people a more significant warning window to avoid any further tragedy and death. While a similar trauma chased Kate away from the tornado scene, she still harbors the hopes of figuring out how to help people by further understanding what makes a tornado tick and the conditions that might allow one to be dissipated by pure science.

Ultimately, the genuine love that Tyler has for storm chasing, the data collected by Javi's upscale team, and Kate's own passion to help people bring her back to those original ambitions. It also helps that while she's trying to pull all of this off, she's often sporting various tank tops that get inevitably dirty, not unlike Jo in the original "Twister."

But there's another element of "Twisters" that could have directly cemented Kate's legacy as the next generation of storm chasers.

Kate eventually learns that Javi's storm-chasing team is gathering data that helps their investor, a local real estate developer, assess the value of storm damaged properties to help him take advantage of people recovering from a disaster. Furthermore, she discovers that all the antics Tyler does for YouTube, including selling those silly t-shirts, help pay for food, water, and other assistance that they provide for those impacted by tornadoes. It creates a clever flipping of the script that puts the protagonist of the movie on the morally questionable team and turns the seemingly reckless storm chasers into the good guys. 

When Kate reaches this low point, she walks away from Javi's team and heads back to her hometown to see her mother, played by Maura Tierney ("The Iron Claw"). As this sequence comes around, you can't help but anticipate that we're about to get an appearance by Helen Hunt. In fact, a moment earlier in the movie feels like a set-up for some kind of reveal. When a journalist following Tyler for a story asks Kate for her last name, in case she gets mentioned, she playfully declines to offer it up. After all, the original news on a "Twister" sequel indicated that the main character was supposed to be Jo's daughter (though it's not clear if she also would have been Bill's daughter), and that would have been a fun reveal to save for later in the movie. 

Upon Kate's arrival at this rural home, her mother doesn't baby her, but she doesn't hesitate to give her a place to stay. It's clear she knows that Kate needs to be back chasing storms. Kate's mother also provides some delicious home-cooked food, not unlike Jo's Aunt Meg, played by Lois Smith in the original "Twister." There's even a shot where Kate looks at photos on the wall in her room with her old team. We could have easily seen other family photos here, and maybe even a photo of the gang from "Twister," which could have given something Kate to aspire to when she was younger.

With such an easy scene that feels like it was made for Helen Hunt's character to return, why didn't she come back? That's also not hard to figure out.

While it would have been easy for Helen Hunt to take the role of Kate's mother in "Twisters," it's fairly clear why she may not have wanted to return. 

Back in 2021, during an appearance on "Watch What Happens Live" with Andy Cohen (via Yahoo), Hunt revealed that she was trying to get a "Twister" sequel off the ground that she wanted to direct with "Blindspotting" stars Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal starring:

"I tried to get it made with Daveed and Rafael and me writing it, and all Black and Brown storm chasers, and they wouldn't do it. I was going to direct it."

Hunt, who appeared in the "Blindspotting" TV series adaptation, went on to explain, "We could barely get a meeting, and this is in June of 2020 when it was all about diversity. And it would have been so cool. 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."

Diggs echoed Hunt's sentiments with a bit of lament in an interview with Business Insider in April 2023:

"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. But, shady in the way that we know the industry is shady."

If the studio wasn't interested in having Hunt direct a "Twister" sequel, then it would make sense if she didn't want to have a role in "Twisters." Plus, I'm sure bringing Hunt back for the sequel would have cost a decent sum, and the studio probably wasn't willing to pay as much. That's just speculation, but like Daveed Diggs said, there are ways that the industry is shady that we are all keenly aware of all the time. But at one point, producers definitely wanted to have Hunt back for the sequel. It just never happened, and director Lee Isaac Chung made that call.

While we did our own interview with Lee Isaac Chung for "Twisters," it's The Wrap who asked about Helen Hunt's prospective involvement with "Twisters" and whether or not she was considered for Maura Tierney's role in the movie. Chung explained that he never actually tried to fit Hunt into that role, and he has a pretty good reason for that:

"I just felt like that is not what I want to see Jo Harding doing years from now. Right after seeing that first film, I imagined, 'What is Jo Harding up to now? She's out there chasing storm, not at the farm complaining that her daughter's not calling her.' And so that was really the basis of why, 'OK, it's got to be someone else.'"

I suppose that makes sense, but people are allowed to age out of their professions and spend some well-earned time retired at home. Letting her daughter grab the torch with similar ambitions for preventing tornado-fueled tragedies would be totally understandable, especially if she gets a chance to help her when she needs it the most. Though she could probably do without worrying about why Kate hasn't called her.

Of course, none of this changes the fact that Kate somehow has the fifth iteration of the Dorothy weather data-collecting system in her possession. How did she get it? Chung didn't have an answer. Maybe we'll find out in a "Twisters" sequel, one with another opportunity to bring back Helen Hunt.