Twister
Two storm-chasing exes and an experimental sensor pod named Dorothy, racing a corporate rival — and the sky itself — across the Plains. It gave the world a CGI flying cow, "We got cows," a near-$500 million gross, and, quietly, one of the first movies ever released on DVD in America.
Directed by Jan de Bont, fresh off Speed, and written by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin, Twister arrived May 10, 1996, as the season-opening salvo of one of the great blockbuster summers. Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt starred as Bill and Jo Harding, storm-chasing former spouses bonded by an obsession with severe weather, with Cary Elwes as the corporate rival chaser and a pre-fame Philip Seymour Hoffman riding in the chase caravan. The plot turns on Dorothy — a device packed with hundreds of small sensors, built to be launched into a tornado's core and revolutionize storm warnings — which mostly means two hours of driving directly at the things everyone else flees.
The tornadoes themselves were the stars, built by Industrial Light & Magic with CGI particle systems — and the most famous effect, the flying cow, was adapted from a CGI zebra ILM had made for Jumanji (1995). "We got cows" instantly became the movie's quotable line. Made for roughly $90 million, Twister grossed $499.2 million worldwide ($245.2 million domestic), the second-highest-grossing film of 1996 behind Independence Day.
Its other claim to history arrived quietly: released on DVD on March 25, 1997, Twister was one of the first feature films ever put out on the format in the US, landing in the launch-era catalogue back when almost nobody owned a player. A movie about chasing the future of weather technology ended up bundled with the future of home video — and for a generation, the sound of a tornado will always come with Paxton yelling into the wind.
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