Sharknado Origins Brings the Flying Sharks Back for a 2026 Prequel Storm

The storm you thought was over is officially back. More than a decade after the original TV movie flooded social media feeds with flying sharks and chainsaw heroics, The Asylum is spinning up a fresh cyclone of chaos with Sharknado Origins, a new prequel that effectively serves as Sharknado 7. The project is in active development and is being lined up for a summer 2026 debut, proving that audiences have not yet escaped the strange gravitational pull of this so-bad-it’s-good phenomenon.

The film will once again be directed by franchise veteran Anthony Ferrante, the filmmaker who helped transform what could have been a forgettable B-movie into a viral cult juggernaut.

From the first film’s absurd concept to increasingly bonkers sequels like Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!, Sharknado: The 4th Awakens and Sharknado 5: Global Swarming, Ferrante leaned hard into the joke. Now he’s returning to tell the story of how the nightmare started in the first place.

Sharknado Origins rewinds the clock to a time before the 2013 original, positioning itself as a full-blown prequel. The film will reportedly follow teenage versions of franchise mainstays Fin and April, long before chainsaws, time travel and celebrity cameos became part of their daily routine. Just as their young romance begins to spark, nature intervenes in the most Sharknado way possible: with the first-ever tornado packed with ravenous, airborne sharks.

The official description teases that “nothing says young love like airborne predators,” which makes it clear that the tone isn’t changing. Fans can expect the same cocktail of melodramatic emotion, outrageous visual effects and proudly ridiculous dialogue that turned Sharknado marathons into a kind of endurance test. Many viewers admit that by the third film their brains felt fried, yet by the sixth they were crying with laughter at how aggressively the series escalated its own madness. That balance between painful and hysterical is exactly the odd itch these movies scratch.

What’s less clear is how much of the original cast will return in any capacity. Ian Ziering and Tara Reid embodied Fin and April through six increasingly wild adventures, culminating in 2018’s The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time, which was heavily marketed as the “final” chapter. Sharknado Origins is set years earlier, so the focus will fall on younger actors, but fans are already speculating about cameos, framing devices and multiverse-style antics that could bring the legacy stars back, even briefly. With this franchise, the only real rule is that there are no rules.

The announcement of yet another sequel arrives in an era where Hollywood is awash in familiar IP. On the horizon are new installments like Toy Story 5, Shrek 5 and perhaps another Ice Age chapter, prompting some moviegoers to joke that we’re stuck in an endless loop of comfort-food franchises. For many, Sharknado Origins feels like the perfect symbol of that trend: a project literally no one was begging for and yet somehow completely inevitable. Even fans who beg the series to stop admit they’ll probably tune in again, if only to see how far the absurdity can be pushed this time.

At the same time, there is a certain chaotic honesty to The Asylum’s approach. These films never pretended to be prestige cinema. They embrace rubbery CGI, shameless puns and plot twists that sound like they were brainstormed at 3 a.m. in a group chat. That unapologetic cheapness is part of the charm. While big-budget disaster movies like the recent Twister revival aim for intensity and realism, some viewers came away joking that what it really needed was the one thing Sharknado has in spades: actual sharks flying through the sky.

For now, Sharknado Origins does not have a locked-in release date, only a target window: sometime before summer 2026 wraps up. The big question is whether it will stick to the TV-movie model that made the original viral or attempt a limited theatrical release, especially after the 10th-anniversary re-release gave the franchise a brief cinema victory lap. Either way, expect the marketing machine to lean into the nostalgia, the memes and the inevitable tagline teases – you can practically hear a poster screaming, “A STORM IS COMING” already.

While we wait for more concrete details, one thing is obvious: Sharknado simply refuses to die. From marathons that leave viewers half-delirious to running jokes about future sequels set in space, this series has transcended its own quality and become an ongoing internet ritual. Whether you think it’s a sign of creative bankruptcy or a kind of anarchic genius, Sharknado Origins will test once again how much absurdity audiences are willing to embrace when the skies open up and the sharks start to fall.