"Sharknado 2: The Second One" whips up storm of viewers
Syfy says its sequel to the horror spoof "Sharknado" snapped up 3.9 million viewers Wednesday night.
The film, officially titled "Sharknado 2: The Second One," nearly tripled the 1.37 million viewers who saw last summer's premiere of the original "Sharknado" film.
Meanwhile, Nielsen estimates that 5.5 million people saw one or more of the 581,000 tweets posted during the airing. At one point, the film held all top 10 trending topics in the United States. By comparison, 318,000 tweets about the first "Sharknado" film were posted when it premiered last July.
"Sharknado" screenwriter Thunder Levin told CBS News, "The first one there was no pressure at all...It was just a lark. It was like, 'Let's do this crazy thing.' And nobody really paid much attention to me. And I wrote a draft and there were a few notes. But not many. On the second one, because the first 'Sharknado' had become this amazing phenomenon, everybody was paying attention. And everybody had their ideas of what it should be...And we actually had fans, which is such a wild concept."
In campy fashion, "Sharknado 2" moved the action from Los Angeles to New York City, which was besieged by its own fearsome storm of rain and falling sharks.
Syfy said the film will air again Saturday and Sunday.
Ian Ziering, one of the film's stars, recently told CBS News that more "Sharknado" sequels are coming.