Inside The Pitch Meeting That Led to Sharknado

Let me stop laughing for a moment so I can type….ah, there we go. There have been a lot, and I mean A LOT of cockamamie ideas for movies throughout the years, but one of them has managed to stand out as one of the craziest and most insane story ideas that have come along in quite a while. No, no I’m not talking about the Twilight series, thankfully. This time around Sharknado is in the crosshairs and it’s for a good reason, the movie was just plain out of control and insane in a way that makes a person wonder how it ever got made in the first place. If your answer is with a next to nothing budget and because it was terrible it was good then give yourself a cookie since you nailed it. Even more insane however is that it gave birth to five sequels that were each watched just as much as the first movie. That’s right, tornadoes with sharks just kept popping up, prompting those that had to fight to survive to come up with new and exciting ways to kill them and to stay alive. Sounds like quite the page-turner when reading the script, right? At this point, it would be interesting to know if this script was pitched when those listening were in a particular state of mind that allowed them to just giggle and say ‘why not?’ before thinking of how we came from Jaws to this.

Having interviewed Tara Reid, one of the stars of the movies, concerning her feelings when it ended, it was amazing to hear that she didn’t even audition for it. She was selected to read for the movie and that was that, they had her, they wanted her, and they got her. As for the others, this movie almost felt as though it was essentially made for actors that needed a second chance, a breath of fresh air, or just a shot to appear in something that might get noticed. It worked obviously, but despite the fact that they were great up to a point, some of their deaths were just flat out gruesome, and morbidly funny since at this point in time shark movies have become a bit of satire as well as horror that people can’t help but find humor in. It’s okay, go on and admit it. Sharknado was a movie that made a lot of jaws drop simply for the fact that it was made in the first place. Of course, jaws hit the floor, no pun intended, when the second, then the third, and so on and so forth continued to roll out. Given that we’d entered the trend that ‘so bad’ translated to ‘so good’ it’s not that surprising, but it is amazing that anyone wanted to fund this train wreck for six movies. Seeing the kind of effects that were used though it’s obvious that the funding was more of a pittance so that the franchise could keep moving ahead to a possible ending at some point.

It might be kind of interesting to sit in on a pitch meeting about something like Sharknado if only to be amazed to see if it actually happened as it does in the video. How many people want to bet that it’s not too far off the mark? It would almost have to be to make this movie, no offense intended since the premise was absolutely nuts and the movie itself was something that a beginning film student might think up just to get their name out there for people to see. The truth is that a lot of people enjoyed Sharknado simply because it was that bad and it was something that could do the most impossible things while getting people to watch and ask for more. I’d say it was like a car wreck, people just couldn’t look away, but eventually, even a car wreck is carted off with the hope that it won’t happen again. Would it have been better if only one had been made? well, that’s kind of hard to say really, but two or three should have been the max limit, but there are apparently plenty of people out there that are willing to punish the rest of the populace with these movies while somehow getting them addicted at the same time. It’s kind of like crack in a way, people know it’s horrible, they know that no good will come of it, and yet some people are just drawn to it. Okay, maybe that’s a bad analogy, but it’s kind of accurate in its own way. The Sharknado series was something that people were hoping would end after a while, but somehow they were still willing to watch each new movie that came out. It makes a weird kind of sense.