'Sharknado 2': Sharknados are coming for you, New York

'Sharknado 2,' as the title implies, will center on tornadoes that suck sharks out of the water and send them flying through the air. 'Sharknado 2,' the sequel to the 2013 Syfy TV movie that became popular on Twitter, airs on July 30. 

Watch out, America. The unlikely-seeming weather phenomenon of a sharknado is back.

Syfy’s TV movie sequel “Sharknado: The Second One,” featuring the self-explanatory sharks inside tornadoes, is premiering on July 30. (Do you really need a plot summary? Okay, here’s a plot summary.) The first movie aired in the summer of 2013 and found bar owner Fin Shepherd (Ian Ziering), his ex-wife, April (Tara Reid), and Fin’s friends taking on the sharks in Los Angeles. It also included the landmark cinematic moment of Fin cutting his way out of the inside of a shark with a chainsaw. 

“Second” will head to New York City. Ziering and Reid will return and the second movie will also include appearances by Vivica A. Fox, Judah Friedlander of the NBC series “30 Rock,” reality star Kelly Osbourne, and singer Billy Ray Cyrus, among others. NBC’s Al Roker and Matt Lauer are also appearing as themselves.

“Sharknado” first aired on July 11 in 2013 but was re-aired by Syfy on July 18 and then on July 27. The July 27 airing scored the highest numbers for an encore presentation of an original movie in Syfy’s history, according to Forbes.

“Second” writer Thunder Levin told the Hollywood Reporter that he thinks the first film attracted so many fans because the movie arrived at a happy medium in terms of tone. 

“It was this bizarre mashup title that delivered on the fun of the title,” Levin said of the first film. “There have been a lot of these movies with crazy titles where they'll either play it completely straight or play it obviously for laughs. Either way, it doesn't quite take off, it doesn't quite have that little wink. The characters in our movie were always grounded. They were never winking at the audience, but there was this sense of fun behind the whole thing. We're going to do some ridiculous stuff and hopefully you're going to enjoy the ride.”

Levin said penning the script for a “Sharknado” film is, of course, slightly different than writing the story for any other movie.

“It still has to have structure, a beginning, middle and end, characters who go from Point A to Point B, “ he said. “But when you get to a certain level of believability, where other scripts have to stop, I get to keep going. What's not fun about that?"