There's no stopping the Sharknado franchise – the totally bonkers series continues with fifth film Global Swarming, and sees Ian Ziering returning as hero Fin Shepard.
But Ziering revealed to Digital Spy on-set that he almost turned the original Sharknado down. In fact, he thought the script was "horrible".
"I thought there were so many holes in the story that needed to be fixed with visual effects," he said. "I couldn't see how it could even be possible. This was a very low budget movie and it was being shot over 16 days, and then knowing that it was going to air soon after it was shot...
"Visual effects take a lot of time to render and composite, so I really didn't see how they were going to be able to do it.
"I did it to provide for my family. My pregnant wife said I needed to go to work. I wanted to pass on it, honestly, I just felt like it just wasn't worth it. But I was having a baby and that was a little slap of reality."
Ziering said he finally signed up for the first Sharknado "begrudgingly" and then "didn't talk about it to anyone".
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"I sort of hoped it would just get slid under the rug and no one would ever see it," he admitted. "And then it turned into Sharknado, this global phenomenon that generated over 5,000 tweets a minute."
That success led Ziering to re-evaluate the appeal of these movies... and he thinks critics who bash Sharknado should do the same.
"You can't compare our movie to… Avatar. You can't compare our movie to… Pacific Rim. It's not The Notebook. This isn't a romantic comedy or an action adventure, this is a fun movie. It's an entirely new genre.
"It's the kind of movie where everyone is in on the joke except for the people in the movie. You can't go from dissecting a $100m blockbuster to judging Sharknado."
Now, he says there are "concepts rolling around" for several more Sharknado films and he's keen to do "one a year" for the foreseeable future.
"It's like a TV series, with one episode every year. It's a major tent-pole exhibition for the network – it's the biggest TV movie that they've ever had – and it has global success. And because they're relatively inexpensive compared to a studio major picture – as long as the audience is still loving it, why wouldn't we continue to keep making them?"
With the new movie throwing time-travel and superheroes into the already wild mix, there's no telling where Sharknado will go next. Outer space? No, wait, it's been done...
Sharknado 5: Global Swarming airs on Sunday (August 6) at 8/7c on Syfy and will get its UK premiere on Syfy UK on Monday (August 7) at 9.10pm.
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