After musing aloud about the difficulty of capturing shark-lightning in a bottle twice, Syfy, home of mashing-up monsters and metaphors, has confirmed it will develop a third Sharknado anyway, in an attempt to capture yet more shark-lightning in an even more crowded bottle. Adweek got the exclusive confirmation of the green light—presumably based on the Sharknado franchise’s existence as less entertainment than hashtag marketing campaign—as well as the exclusive rights to use the 3harknado joke, which it already made. With Sharknado 2: The Second One not slated to air until July 30, there’s obviously no word yet on where the story might go from here, or which roles might be played by ’90s celebrities for whom it was either this or Dancing With The Stars. However, it is expected to continue the saga’s epic tale of sharks being flung at buildings and people and whatever etc., please make comments on Twitter again.
Also in development at Syfy are several projects whose inclusion of sharknadoes is tenuous at best—chief among them The Magicians, an adaptation of Lev Grossman’s popular fantasy series that was previously in development at Fox. Long described as a “Harry Potter for grown-ups,” the novels track a group of New York twentysomethings who study magic and stand up against grave dangers to the Earth that somehow do not include the gravest, i.e. tornadoes filled with sharks.
Syfy is also adapting several acclaimed graphic novels that all have a noticeable dearth of violent, shark-filled winds, such as: Frank Miller’s Ronin, a miniseries about a 13th-century samurai reborn in a 21st-century New York that has yet to be leveled by airborne sharks; Jonathan Hickman’s Pax Romana, about a Special Forces team that tries to avert World War III by traveling back to ancient Rome, pitting Roman legions against modern-day weapons of destruction that don’t include flying sharks; Oni Press’ Letter 44, about a newly elected president who discovers a stunning letter revealing a secret mission to an alien civilization, one that hasn’t even heard of shark-tornadoes; and Clone, a comic from The Walking Dead’s Robert Kirkman about a doctor who learns he’s just one of many competing clones of himself. “Is one of them a cy-clone bursting to the brim with sharks?” he surely asks, to which the answer is a resounding, disappointing “No.”
And finally in Syfy news, Battleshark Sharklactica’s Tricia Helfer is set to return to the network in its upcoming event series Ascension, playing another powerful, seductive character who’s involved in a government space mission gone awry. It is believed the show’s series finale will reveal that each of us were sharknadoes all along, fated to whirl around each other in an endless cycle of sharks. All of these sharknadoes happened before, and all of them will happen again.