We miss a good old-fashioned disaster movie. Before superheroes seized the summer blockbuster crown it was common to see movies like Dante’s Peak, Armageddon, or The Day After Tomorrow become some of the highest-grossing movies of the year.
Sadly, if 2021’s 13 Minutes is any indication, a return to past successes may be unlikely. This tornado movie stars American Beauty‘s Thora Birch and was the final Anne Heche movie released before her untimely death in 2022.
The movie focuses on multiple characters in an Oklahoma town struggling with social issues like homophobia, hatred of immigrants and abortion protests. These debates are thrown into perspective when a gigantic tornado rips through the town and completely destroys it, leaving the bewildered survivors struggling to rebuild their lives.
But on its release in 2021 nobody was interested. Critics dismissed it as “cringey”, “clunky”, and full of “shallow redneck stereotypes”. Audiences don’t appear to have been interested either. As per BoxOfficeMojo, 13 Minutes made a minuscule $67,413 over its entire theatrical run.
That said, it seems 13 Minutes spent about 13 minutes in theaters before being shuffled off to streaming. Here it seems to be something of a sleeper hit, as it’s snuck onto the Paramount Plus worldwide charts and seems to be rising fast. It’s doing particularly well in Honduras, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Paraguay, so perhaps they’re hungry for some Heche.
Mercifully this isn’t the end for tornado movies. 1996’s Twister is getting a long-delayed sequel in summer 2024. Twisters will follow the children of Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt’s characters as they chase down even bigger and scarier tornadoes. Here’s hoping they throw in a flying cow or two.