There were a lot of mixed reactions upon last year’s release of director Guillermo del Toro‘s most recent robo-juggernaut vs. monster spectacle, Pacific Rim. The film did okay at the box office, but not great, so the chance of a sequel remained a bit blurry thereafter. And yes, they still are, although that hasn’t stopped del Toro from doing his best to put a new script together for the sequel with screenwriter Zak Penn.
“I’m working very, very hard with Zak Penn,” del Toro says. “We’ve been working for a few months now in secret. We found a way to twist it around. Travis Beacham was involved in the storyline and now I’m writing with Zak because Travis has become a TV mogul.”
Beacham previously worked on the first film which starred Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi as futuristic synchronized pilots of armed robot vehicles called Jaegers in a devastating war against a Kaiju alien lifeforce that keeps emerging from a mysterious deep sea wormhole with increasingly destructive results. Despite some hopes for a prequel, and provided that he’ll be allowed back at the helm, del Toro insists on moving the story forward in sequel fashion, which would ultimately see Hunnam and Kikuchi reprise their roles from the first film.
However, that decision is up to Legendary Pictures CEO Thomas Tull who expressed his own conditional optimism to the folks over at IAmRouge back in mid-May. “Here’s the deal.” he says. “We’re very close with Guillermo. He’s doing Crimson Peak for us right now. With the amount of money that we did on Pacific Rim, over $400 million, it didn’t quite hit our expectations, but it did better than a lot of other films. If there’s another great story to tell with Guillermo then we’re all over it because we think it’s really hard to create one of these things from scratch. The movie did really well on home video and merchandise, and it certainly has a big international following. We’re not just going to do Pacific Rim 2 just to do it. Right now we’re talking to Guillermo del Toro. If we can crack the story, we all think it’s great, and it’s him at the helm, then fantastic. But right now there’s nothing going on officially to proclaim.”
Personally, I enjoyed the film. It wasn’t perfect, but I love the work that del Toro does in his movies, for all its visual detail and depth in storytelling to accompany its usual blockbuster qualities. And as much as I still want a Hellboy 3 (along with every other fan of the Hellboy franchise and its lead actor), I Iook forward to the prospects of their being a follow-up to the story of lead characters Raleigh Beckett and Mako Mori, and just exactly what other levels of craziness del Toro has in store. Besides, Penn has done some pretty awesome work of his own on films such as Last Action Hero (1993), Behind Enemy Lines (2001), and at least four Marvel Movies, including Marvel’s The Avengers, so I’m pretty stoked we’ll have something pretty cool, scriptwise; Penn is also currently attached to Breck Eisner’s forthcoming sequel production of The Karate Kid 2 with actor Jaden Smith returning.
Del Toro does have a bit of a full plate though, between working on projects for film and TV. But, I certainly hope these movies are in the cards, so I’ll stay upbeat about it.
Stay tuned for more info, and if you haven’t seen the first film, it’s currently available on DVD, VoD, digital download and Blu-Ray.