The original Twister, released in 1996, emerged during a golden age in Hollywood that erased the previously held threshold that kept A-list actors away from B-movie material. It didn’t get much better than casting John Malkovich as Cyrus the Virus in Jerry Bruckheimer’s 1997 blockbuster bruiser Con Air, but making Helen Hunt the lead in a disaster movie — just a year away from winning an Oscar opposite Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets — certainly gave Twister some unexpected gravitas.

Twisters, however, is part of a more recent phenomenon: the Sundance-to-tentpole pipeline that started in 2012 when Colin Trevorrow went straight from Safety Not Guaranteed to Jurassic World.

Twisters marks a similar leap forward for director Lee Isaac Chung, who scored a big indie breakout hit in 2020 with the low-key family drama Minari. The two films share some rustic overlap — Chung shoots Oklahoma with the same affection he previously gave to Arkansas — but,...