Guillermo Del Toro Says He Had To Choose Between ‘Justice League Dark’ And ‘Pacific Rim 2’

Guillermo del Toro
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Guillermo del Toro is almost as well known for the projects he never manages to turn into movies as the movies that get made themselves. You need a mop bucket to hold all the drool coming out of geek orifices when you go through his list of creative endeavors stuck in development hell, like an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, his Silent Hill game with Metal Gear director Hideo Kojima, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Hellboy 3… the list goes on and on.

You can now add one more awesome movie to the growing pile of things del Toro was going to do, but can’t any more: DC’s Justice League Dark. Via the Daily Beast:

According to del Toro, that decision came down to a scheduling conflict with Pacific Rim 2, which he’s in pre-production on ahead of a 2017 release.

“Warners liked the script, they were very enthusiastic and wanted to green-light it but they wanted it to coincide with the shoot of Pacific Rim 2,” he said. “I was put in a very difficult place facing a difficult choice, and I chose to do Pacific Rim 2.”

Justice League Dark is the team-up of supernatural characters in the DC universe, with the best known character being John Constantine. Standing on its own, it may not have attracted too much hype. But with Guillermo del Toro behind it, it was quickly building up some serious steam. At least del Toro’s script for the movie has already been completed. So long as they don’t completely butcher that, we should still end up with a seriously spooky superhero movie in two years.

While it may seem silly for del Toro to sacrifice his opportunity to direct an original idea like Justice League Dark so he can work on a sequel to Pacific Rim, keep in mind that Hollywood is a business. The more blockbusters Guillermo puts together, the easier it gets for that pile of discarded movie ideas to turn into a pile of greenlit films. He said as much to the Comic-Con crowd last week, claiming he’d twist arms to make Hellboy 3 if Pacific Rim 2 performs up to expectations.

Meanwhile, Michael Bay still gets to make any damn thing he wants. What a world we live in.

(via the Daily Beast)

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