Background and career
Thunder Levin is an American screenwriter and director, known for writing the first four Sharknado television films. Levin's work was largely responsible for the resurgence of sharksploitation films.
Levin was born and raised in New York City. His father, Michael, was an award-winning journalist, while his mother, Glenis, was an immigrant from Liverpool, England. He graduated from Hunter College High School, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in film from New York University.
Levin moved to Los Angeles at the age of 23. In the late 1980s, he worked as a still photographer on three films for the film producer Roger Corman. His feature-film directorial debut was the 2008 horror comedy Mutant Vampire Zombies from the 'Hood!, starring C. Thomas Howell. Levin subsequently wrote and directed multiple films for production company The Asylum, including the 2012 science-fiction action film American Warships and the 2013 science fiction film AE: Apocalypse Earth.
In 2013, Levin wrote the made-for-television disaster film Sharknado, about a tornado of shark-infested seawater. The film's debut on the Syfy cable channel attracted nearly 1.37 million viewers and generated nearly 5,000 tweets a minute at its peak. In 2014, Levin wrote a sequel, Sharknado 2: The Second One, which had 3.9 million viewers. Levin subsequently wrote two more sequels, 2015's Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! and 2016's Sharknado: The 4th Awakens. Sharknado became a pop-culture phenomenon, ultimately spawning five sequels, a video game, a book, a one-shot comic book, a documentary, and a mockumentary.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
