Sharknado: How a Ridiculous Premise Became a Social Media Phenomenon

By Vicky FastForward | The Scream Queen of Style

Sharknado premiered on the Syfy channel on July 11, 2013 and received modest ratings. Then Twitter discovered it, and the event became something genuinely unprecedented in the history of bad movie culture: a social media feeding frenzy in real time, an audience watching together while narrating their own disbelief directly to each other and to the actors, who were also online and responding. By the end of the broadcast, #Sharknado was trending worldwide. By the next morning, The Asylum — the production company that made the film for approximately $2 million — was planning a sequel. The film's premise — a tornado picks up sharks from the ocean and deposits them over Los Angeles, where they devour people while still alive and airborne — is objectively ridiculous, and the film knows this, and Twitter knew this, and everyone had an excellent time.

Ian Ziering and Tara Reid as the franchise's leads are perfectly calibrated for their purpose. Ziering, previously known as Steve Sanders from Beverly Hills 90210, attacks chainsaw-in-tornado-shark sequences with the commitment of a man who has decided that absurdity is a legitimate art form and he is going to master it. Reid brings a particular kind of resigned disbelief to her performance that functions as an audience surrogate — her expression throughout the franchise essentially reads as "yes, this is happening, apparently." The supporting cast in each entry featured an escalating roster of celebrity cameos — Tara Reid's sharkbitten arm, Jedward on a London bridge, a former president of the United States dispatching sharks from a helicopter — that functioned as a social media guessing game before each new entry.

The franchise produced six entries in four years, each escalating the geographical and conceptual absurdity. Sharknado 2 went to New York. Sharknado 3 added a space sequence. Sharknado 4 introduced multiple simultaneous sharknados of different elemental compositions. Sharknado 5: Global Swarming toured the world's major cities. The Last Sharknado: It's About Time went back to the beginning of human civilization, because if you're going to end a franchise about flying killer sharks, the prehistoric era is the only logical destination. Each entry was watched live with the same Twitter ritual, the communal experience becoming as important as the film itself.

The cultural significance of Sharknado extends beyond its own modest artistic ambitions. It demonstrated that in the social media era, the experience of watching a film together and commenting on it in real time could create value that the film itself did not contain. The Sharknado live-watching community developed its own rituals, vocabulary, and sense of collective ownership. The Asylum, previously known primarily for producing mockbusters — cheap imitations of major studio releases designed to confuse consumers — suddenly had a genuine cultural phenomenon on its hands, which required an adjustment in both self-presentation and production approach.

Sharknado represents something genuinely new in the history of bad cinema: a film that was intentionally bad in full knowledge of how bad-movie audiences consume content, produced by a company that had spent years making unintentionally bad films and learned exactly which qualities generated mockery. It is the first franchise to have been engineered from the beginning for the live-tweet experience, and its success prompted a significant wave of similar productions — all chasing the lightning that Sharknado captured so unexpectedly on that July Thursday in 2013, when the internet discovered that watching sharks fly into a tornado together was exactly what it had been waiting for.