The Washington Free Beacon’s Ellison Barber interviewed Sonny Bunch, the Free Beacon’s Managing Editor, about the latest TV movie phenomenon—"Sharknado 2: The Second One" on the Blaze TV Wednesday evening.
"I don’t see how you cannot be excited for a movie called "Sharknado 2," Bunch exclaimed. He recalled that he missed the beginning of the first Sharknado last summer. When he logged onto Twitter, he was met with "all of these crazy tweets about these awful acting and the special effects are terrible." He switched the movie on and was "transfixed." Bunch called the shark movie craze "something of a social event ... It’s kind of the perfect symbol for the millennial generation."
Barber recounted that 1.4 million viewers tuned in for the first airing of Sharknado, the second garnered 1.9 million people watching, and the third airing captured the attention of 2.1 million people- collectively 5.3 million eager viewers watching the shark drama with bated breath.
"It’s a weird thing- it’s so bad ... It’s very B-movie and in its badness there is fun. There is that kind of communal sense of ‘Hey, we’re watching this thing and we’re kind of having a good time with it, and we’re not taking it too seriously.’ … This is what people really enjoyed about it," Bunch said, weighing in on the appeal of the crazy shark movie.
"Is there some broad thing that we can say there’s a reason why society wants to now accept and praise garbage? Should we be worried about this?" Barber asked Bunch.
He responded, "Society has kind of always praised garbage ... I do think there’s something so inherently absurd about the "Sharknado" concept—the idea that this tornado would pick up all of the sharks and then it would flood LA and then New York. Frankly, the second "Sharknado" phenomenon is very confusing to me. I can buy one "Sharknado," but two? Haven’t we figured out how to stop the sharknados?"