Entertainment Weekly has posted a new article about the upcoming Pacific Rim movie, due out this summer! They spoke with director Guillermo del Toro, and fortunately, while he did reveal some elements of the plot, he did so without giving everything away. We brought you news of a Pacific Rim Sequel back in January, but did you know it was already greenlit? Here’s why and then some…
Director Guillermo del Toro’s giant-robots giant-robots-versus-giant-monsters sci-fi action epic Pacific Rim won’t stomp into theaters until July 12, but the film’s backers already see its franchise potential as, well, giant—so much so that a sequel was greenlit before the movie was finished. After the first screening, Legendary Entertainment CEO Thomas Tull immediately told del Toro to start writing a follow-up. “He said, ‘Do you think you can come up with a great idea?’ ” del Toro remembers. “I said, ‘F—, yeah!’ ! Because on the way to the finished screenplay, there were entire angles and ideas that we chopped off because they were too much.”
For the sequel, del Toro doesn’t want 1 on 1 matches like the old Godzilla movies. He wants to explore the Kaiju:
Instead, del Toro and co-writer Travis Beacham plan to delve deeper into the alien forces behind the kaiju (Japanese for “giant monsters”), who in the first film invade Earth from their so-called “antiverse” through a breach at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, only to be met by a last stand of human defenders (including Sons of Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam). “They’re a race of blind consumers grabbing planets, consuming them, and moving to the next,” says del Toro. “The idea [with the sequel] is to explore a little bit of that. I won’t spoil it, but I don’t think we’ll repeat a single beat from the first movie.”
The article ends with del Toro stating to not expect the sequel so soon; it took a year and a half to finish the script of Pacific Rim and will take at least 2 years to write the next.
