Sharknado 2 whips up a storm on Twitter

Syfy says its sequel to the horror spoof Sharknado snapped up 3.9 million viewers Wednesday night.

The film, officially titled Sharknado 2: The Second One, nearly tripled the 1.37 million viewers who saw last summer’s premiere of the original Sharknado film.

Meanwhile, Nielsen estimates that 5.5 million people saw one or more of the 581,000 tweets posted during the airing. At one point, the film held all top 10 trending topics in the United States. By comparison, 318,000 tweets about the first Sharknado film were posted when it premiered last July.

In campy fashion, Sharknado 2 moved the action from Los Angeles to New York City, which was besieged by its own fearsome storm of rain and falling sharks.