News & Politics

Here’s the First Look at Sharknado 3

In which Washington is destroyed by, well, you know.

Screenshot via SyFy.

Washington has met its bloody, destructive fate on the big and small screens so many times before—alien invasions, meteor strikes, ice ages, more aliens. So it’s only logical that at some point, the city falls to great white sharks that arrive here via tornado.

SyFy has released the first teaser trailer for Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!, the third installment in its low-budget series of laughably bad, but impressively social-media-bating disaster movies. While the trailer is light on detail, it does offer a glimpse of how DC will endure its latest cinematic trashing: a shark lounging in the lap of the Lincoln Memorial; the series’s hero, Ian Ziering, firing automatic rifles from each hand in some ornate corridor; and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, playing the President of the United States. (Other announced cameos have been far more Washington-ish, from former Representative Michele Bachmann playing herself to Anthony Weiner and linebacker Ryan Kerrigan playing NASA employees.)

Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! premieres July 22 at 9 PM on SyFy and probably all over your social-media feeds because people on the internet won’t be able to stop themselves from writing lame tweets about how Congress won’t authorize DC’s shark-removal funding without attaching some meddlesome policy rider.

Staff Writer

Benjamin Freed joined Washingtonian in August 2013 and covers politics, business, and media. He was previously the editor of DCist and has also written for Washington City Paper, the New York Times, the New Republic, Slate, and BuzzFeed. He lives in Adams Morgan.