Guillermo del Toro is already planning a sequel to Pacific Rim .
Pacific Rim hasn’t even hit theaters yet, but that isn’t stopping director Guillermo del Toro from planning ahead. After all, the new trailer for the film left audiences either shaking their heads in dismay or super excited for another action-packed alien invasion film that just happens to star some giant robots and Ron Perlman. Even the studio is seeing enough potential in this film to give the go-ahead.
Legendary Entertainment CEO Thomas Tull saw the early screening and immediately told Guillermo del Toro to start writing a follow-up. The Pacific Rim director says, “He said, ‘Do you think you can come up with a great idea?’ 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.”
Pacific Rim has been called a souped up homage to the classic monster movies such as Godzilla , to which Guillermo del Toro responded that those old films were more like oversized wrestling matches. Pacific Rim is more than just “Here’s the hero monster , here’s the rival monster, round one, fight.”
Guillermo del Toro adds about the movie’s alien monsters, the Kaiju (Japanese for “giant monsters”), “They’re a race of blind consumers grabbing planets, consuming them, and moving to the next. 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.”
Pacific Rim ‘s director explained why we shouldn’t expect the sequel to come too soon, “It will take us a while to develop. I don’t think the screenplay will come out so quick. It took us a year and a half to do this script, and It’ll take us at least two years to develop the other script.”
After all, like a certain Michael Bay franchise, you can’t rush a script about giant monsters and expect it to be good. Giant projects take giant planning.
What do you think of Guillermo del Toro’s decision to go ahead with the sequel to Pacific Rim ?