Her estranged husband, Bill, an ex-storm chaser turned TV weatherman, travels to Oklahoma with his fiancée Melissa to obtain Jo's signature on their divorce papers.

Bill soon learns that Jonas Miller, a rival storm chaser and former colleague with corporate funding, has stolen his idea for his own Dorothy-like device, Dot3, with plans to deploy it first and claim credit for its design.

With the truck damaged, Bill forces them to retreat, but Jo undergoes an emotional breakdown over the failure, and unloads about her motivations and her father's death.

Inspired by Aunt Meg's wind-vane sculptures, Bill and Jo add aluminum "wings" to the last two Dorothy prototype sensors, making them more aerodynamic.

The gamble is successful, as Dorothy IV's probes provide immediate scientific data, but without their truck, Jo and Bill are forced to run as the tornado shifts toward them.

ILM assigned Stefen Fangmeier to be the effects supervisor for his experience with tornadoes, having helped create simulations while working with storm chasers in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

[6] Spielberg himself was originally attached to direct the project, and directors such as James Cameron, John Badham, Tim Burton, and Robert Zemeckis were also in talks to helm the film before Jan de Bont signed on to Twister after leaving Godzilla due to creative differences.

[7] De Bont was invited by Spielberg after the success of directorial debut Speed, which was released in 1994, following a long career as a director of photography, and described the project as "a Grimm fairy tale where the monster comes out of dark clouds".

Crichton said the two bases for the script were a PBS documentary about storm chasers and the plot of romantic comedy His Girl Friday, where a newspaper editor and his ex who is engaged to another man do one last job together.

Two screenwriters would later sue the studios claiming Twister was taken from their ideas: Daniel Perkins, whose script Tornado Chasers dealt with the military harnessing tornadoes as weapons and settled for an undisclosed amount; and Stephen B. Kessler, author of a script about storm chasers in Oklahoma called Catch the Wind, and whose case was eventually dismissed.

He also attempted to reduce the amount of establishing scenes and exposition "that makes a movie almost immediately less interesting" while feeling that "things will explain themselves as you keep watching", but the studio insisted on it.

[13] Hunt initially was uninterested, declaring that "I just didn’t know what I could really contribute acting-wise", but changed her mind after having lunch with de Bont and Spielberg at Amblin's offices.

[15] De Bont wanted the storm chaser crew to resemble the ones he met during pre-production, a team of University of Oklahoma grad students.

[7] Among the changes, Hunt complained that Jo and Melissa's interactions were "sort of catty with each other", prompting her to tell the producers “That’s not gonna be fun to play or to watch.

I’m not sure if I want to do that.”[14] After the Oklahoma City bombing occurred on April 19, 1995, filming of Twister was suspended while the cast and crew worked with relief efforts.

[20][21] Halfway through filming, both Paxton and Hunt were temporarily blinded by bright electronic lamps used to make the sky behind the two actors look dark and stormy.

[7] Jo and Bill inside the F5 tornado was filmed by rolling the set in a gimbal so the ground stood in the ceiling as Hunt and Paxton hung from a metal bar, with the footage then being flipped upside down to appear as if they were being sucked upwards by the storm.

[7] When De Bont, in a fit of rage, knocked over a camera assistant who missed a cue into a ditch and refused to apologize, Burgess and his crew walked off the set, much to the shock of the cast.

[22] Two days before principal filming ended, Green was injured when a hydraulic house set (used in the scene in which Jo and Bill rescue Meg and her dog Mose from her destroyed home in Wakita), designed to collapse on cue, was mistakenly activated with him inside it.

[7] Because overcast skies were not always available, De Bont had to shoot many of the film's tornado-chasing scenes in bright sunlight, requiring Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) to more than double its original plan for 150 "digital sky-replacement" shots.

Last-minute reshoots in March and April 1996 (to clarify a scene about Jo as a child) and overtime requirements in post production and at ILM, are thought to have raised the budget to $90 million.

Warner eventually made the decision to push forward its release date to May 10, 1996, in order to avoid competition with Paramount's Mission: Impossible two weeks later.

[39] Special features on this release include an audio commentary by Jan de Bont and Stefen Fangmeier to listen throughout the film, behind-the-scenes footage, trailers and a Van Halen music video.

The site's critics consensus reads: "A high-concept blockbuster that emphasizes special effects over three-dimensional characters, Twister's visceral thrills are often offset by the film's generic plot.

[71] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Somehow Twister stays as up-tempo and exuberant as a roller-coaster ride, neatly avoiding the idea of real danger".

[72] Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B" rating, and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, "Yet the images that linger longest in my memory are those of windswept livestock.

[73] In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, "But the ringmaster of this circus, the man without whom nothing would be possible, is director De Bont, who now must be considered Hollywood's top action specialist.

J. Berry Harrison, the owner of the home and a former Oklahoma state senator, commented that the tornado appeared eerily similar to the fictitious one in the film.

Universal also funded the NSSL meteorologists to go on a mobile tour in the eastern half of the country, staging safety presentations at science museums in a dozen major cities.

[97] In June 2020, a remake was announced to be in development from the original film's international distributor, Universal Pictures, with Joseph Kosinski in early negotiations to serve as director.