'Sharknado' Will Be in Theaters August 2

By now, you've most likely heard of Sharknado, Syfy's TV-movie that premiered on July 11 staring Ian Ziering, Tara Reid, and John Heard. But if you caught all the hype and missed the television event, you still have a chance to see the bizarre masterpiece: Sharknado is now coming to over 200 select theaters on Friday, August 2 at a single showtime of 12:05 am.

The theater premiere will include "never-before-seen Sharknado footage such as a behind-the-scenes featurette and a gag reel." Audiences are so excited for the event that they are even purchasing advanced tickets online.  

In the days leading up to Sharknado's TV release, the Syfy creation became a phenomenon on social media. Twitter and Vine blew up with thousands of posts and pictures of Sharknado memes in anticipation. According to a blogpost on Twitter, the TV premiere "generated 318,232 tweets during broadcast and 5,000 tweets per minute at its peak." When it aired, it was hands down "the most-social program on TV in the U.S."

Source: Mashable

The only question more puzzling than how Tara Reid made her way from American Pie to this shark-infested mess is how to explain the continuing success of this bizarre TV-turned-theater film. Audiences responded to the TV-movie with a mixture of excitement, shock and pure confusion. The original trailer offered an ambiguous look at the TV premiere: "Sharks. Tornado. Sharknado. Enough said," was all the preview revealed. 

Source: MovieWeb

The Sharknado: Official Asylum movie promo offers a bit more insight than the TV trailer. 

Essentially, the movie will be exactly what the title implies: the story of a strange storm that herds together schools of sharks, producing a shark-infested tornado that sweeps over Los Angeles, California.

Sharknado will live on long after the one-night-only theater premiere. According to Mashable, Syfy has already announced they will be producing a sequel in July 2014 and they are launching a competition on Twitter for fans to compete for the naming rights using the hashtag #Sharknado. According to the New York Post, the sequel will be set in New York City.

It appears that Americans have a strange fascination with sharks that the media loves to capitalize on, and Sharknado is no exception. The movie theater premiere of Sharknado comes right before the August 4th start of "Shark Week," Discovery Channel's most-loved event of the year. 

If you're planning an end-of-summer beach getaway, the Sharknado movie event is one thing you might want to avoid.