Spoilers below.
After watching Twisters this weekend, your mind might be swirling with questions, like: Is it really possible to stop a tornado? Why isn’t Glen Powell’s dog, Brisket, in the movie? And is watching in 4DX worth it? (According to a few of our editors, it really is.) But the one really eating away at viewers seems to be: Why don’t they kiss at the end?
The natural disaster movie, which has exceeded box office projections and comes 28 years after the 1996 original Twister, is a full-on blockbuster romp with thrilling tornado chases, Glen Powell’s unstoppable charm, and lines like “You don’t face your fears; you ride ’em.” Directed by Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung, it follows a genius former tornado chaser, Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), as she’s pulled back into the field by her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) to study a string of dangerous storms in her home state of Oklahoma. There, a reckless chaser and YouTuber, Tyler (Powell), blows into their path. While Kate and Tyler butt heads at first, they end up working together, set off a few sparks, and Kate saves the day in the end. When she leaves for New York in the last scene, Tyler unexpectedly meets her at the airport to see her off, then chases her into the check-in line to say a real goodbye. It’s a classic romantic trope that should end with a kiss—but doesn’t. Instead, Tyler and Kate stare into each others eyes and, when another twister approaches in the background, they leave together to chase it.
But here’s the thing: They did film a kiss at the airport, but apparently Steven Spielberg, a producer on Twisters as well as the original Twister, advised to remove it to avoid following cliches.
“It think it’s a Spielberg note, wasn’t it? Do you know what it is? I think it stops the film feeling too cliched, actually,” Edgar-Jones told Collider. “I think there’s something really wonderful about it feeling like there’s a continuation. This isn’t the end of their story. They’re united by their shared passion for something.”
Maybe avoiding the kiss cliche would’ve worked...if the cliche (and several others) wasn’t already so clearly set up. An enemies to teammates to lovers arc? Man chases woman into the airport to say goodbye? Deleting a kiss doesn’t really remove a cliche, it just leaves one obviously unfinished.
Are we supposed to suspend our disbelief and buy that someone can stop a tornado with a college science project—and survive—but we can’t expect the two attractive leads to kiss? The premise of the film is already so ridiculous that a smooch would not have been overboard. The first Twister actually leaned into that cheesiness: After Helen Hunt’s Jo and Bill Paxton’s Bill strapped themselves to a pipe and survive an F5 tornado passing over them, they kiss amid the debris while celebrating with their friends. Sure, it’s a little cringe, but it still works. It’s a big, grand, somewhat unserious movie—a little kiss won’t hurt!
Powell also told Collider that Twisters “is not about them finding love. It’s returning Kate to the thing that she loves, which is storm chasing.” He later added, “I feel like a kiss would be sort of unrepresentative of the right goal at the end of the movie.”
Kate’s passion for tornadoes is clear, but so is the romantic tension between her and Tyler, from their flirtatious banter and playful competitiveness, to their intimate conversations. I mean, the fact that he showed up at her childhood home, based on info from a years-old newspaper article? Or that her mother invites him to stay the night? And he leaves her house the next morning in the pouring rain in a wet T-shirt??? Come on. All of the pieces for a cliche love story are already there. And with a chemistry machine like Glen Powell involved, you just can’t help but root for the pair to fall in love.
If the decision to remove the kiss was to say that this capable, intelligent, Independent Woman—who just saved an entire town including the hunky guys most would expect to protect her—doesn’t need to kiss a prince charming at the end of her story, I find some weight to that argument. But the film doesn’t even pass the Bechdel test, and feminists like to kiss hot guys too!
Of course, there are many films where the two leads don’t kiss and it works, like last year’s Past Lives and I’ll even hand it to Sleepless in Seattle. In Twisters, though, we’ve already gotten swept up into an almost-love story, but were left hanging.
“I feel like audiences are in a different place now in terms of wanting a kiss or not wanting a kiss,” Chung said of the responses to Entertainment Weekly. “I actually tried the kiss, and it was very polarizing—and it’s not because of their performance of the kiss.”
He added that the no-kiss ending “was the other option that I had filmed on the day, and I got to say, I like it better. I think it’s a better ending. And I think that people who want a kiss within it, they can probably assume that these guys will kiss someday. And maybe we can give them privacy for that. In a way, this ending is a means to make sure that we really wrap things up with it in a celebratory, good way. If it ends on the kiss, then it makes it seem as though that’s what Kate’s journey was all about, to end up with a kiss. But instead, it’s better that it ends with her being able to continue doing what she’s doing with a smile on her face.”
The rest of us will just have to imagine what happens next.
