NBC Press Day: ‘Sharknado 2’ Blows Up Sharks With Bombs While Keeping Characters ‘Grounded’

Syfy‘s Sharknado 2: The Second One is similar to the original Sharknado — but in New York, director Anthony C. Ferrante told reporters at NBCU’s Summer Press Day. “We never stopped making the first movie,” he told a reporter who asked how the second would differ from the first. “This thing never stopped…If it stayed in Los Angeles it would have been boring,” he said, but the sequel will feature the Statue of Liberty and Broadway, which, of course, the original could not. In the sequel, killer sharks get caught up in a massive tornado that invades Manhattan, making life a living hell for the locals. “This to me is the most important film ever made about climate change,” snarked cast member Judah Friedlander today at the NBCU Summer Press Day in Pasadena.

“We’re making a movie called ‘Sharknado’ and if you don’t embrace it you end up with a movie that’s not fun. We were trying to emulate a blockbuster movie with their craft service budget for a day,”  Ferrante explained. This new bit of science fiction is not about “military and scientists…it’s blowing up sharks with bombs,” Ferrante said, quickly adding, “We always try to ground the characters as much as possible.”

The day Sharknado aired, Ferrante said he thought it would play out like other like-minded movies he’s made, but then the tweets “started intensifying” and once they saw Mia Farrow was in the mix “I said ‘something has happened.’ …By the end of the night CNN wanted to do an interview ,and I did Nightline. It got every weird. That night we knew something had happened — we just didn’t know the scale of it.”

In Sharknado 2, “a freak weather system turns its deadly fury on New York City, unleashing a ‘sharknado’ on the city’s population and its most iconic sites,” Syfy has said of the sequel. The original orgy of bad special effects and even worse acting had triggered a social media feeding frenzy among journalists and celebrities when it premiered last July.  The premiere audience, however, wasn’t so large — an average of 1.369 million people — mostly journalists and celebrities. In case you were among the other 312 million or so people in the country who missed the original, in round numbers it went like this: the ecological nightmare caused by global warming triggers a freak weather system that results in a mega tornado choc-a-block with angry sharks who sail through the air attacking innocent children and blondes, and causing to be uttered such lines as “they took my grandfather, so I really hate sharks.” The movie culminated in a mano-a-sharko scene, in which our hero Ian Ziering was swallowed by a flying shark but, happily, he had his chainsaw with him at the time; he sawed his way out, also rescuing the distressed damsel who’d earlier been consumed whole by same shark.

Earlier this month, NBC’s Today show co-anchor Matt Lauer announced  he and Al Roker shot cameos for Sharknado 2: The Second One, debuting July 30 on the fellow NBCUniversal network. Lauer’s Today co-host Savannah Guthrie, giving the performance of her lifetime, responded that she was “wildly jealous.” Today played a clip in which Roker, on the Today set, explains to Lauer, “This is a twister with teeth.” Lauer contributes: “Enough said indeed, Al, Thank you very much.” Lauer also showed a clip in which he used a Today orange umbrellas to stab something that looked like it came from the fish department of Whole Foods, only wrapped in green fabric. “I can’t believe we gave away the whole climax of the movie,” Lauer said. “I’ll remind you the Golden Globes are next January — who are you wearing?” Guthrie snarked.