Some people prefer JJ Abrams’ “Mystery Box” approach when it comes to marketing a movie and discussing projects that are in-progress — they don’t want their payoff in installments; they want the lump sum when they’re sitting in the theater. Others like it when a filmmaker is so bad at containing their excitement about a project that they wind up sharing details far earlier than they probably need to.
Guillermo del Toro is a primary example of this, which is why I feel like I know more about the plot of the Justice League: Dark movie and the theoretical Pacific Rim sequels than I do about Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Whether this is generally a good thing or a bad thing depends entirely on your perspective, but there is nothing bad about finding out Charlie Day and Burn Gorman are both going to be back for Pacific Rim 2, and that’s exactly what del Toro revealed in a recent interview with Collider when he was asked about the amount of science in the sequel.
“Yes. It’s quite a different movie from the first one in that, but I think that two of our main characters like in the first one are Burn and Charlie. They are really, really – I mean, honestly, they are probably the guys I have the most fun writing along with Hannibal Chau so just from a purely selfish drive, I like writing them. I love writing for Charlie and Burn. I mean, [Burn’s] in Crimson Peak for that reason, because I love working with him. You’re gonna get a lot of that, but the Kaijus are very different and you’re gonna see a very different type of the robots I think. It’s gonna be quite a different adventure.”
While del Toro confirms that there will be Kaijus in the film, he also let it be known that they would not be present at the start of the film, which takes place years after the events of the first film.
“It’s a few years after the first one. It’s not an immediate follow-up. It is the world having been freed of Kaiju, what happens to the world after – what happens to the Jaeger technology once the Kaiju are not a threat. It’s quite a jump.”
So he’s Ghostbusters 2ing it? Honestly, that sounds like an interesting way back in, but the first film felt like battle porn to me and there were plenty of critics who were hoping for more from the story. If Gorman, Day, and science are in the driver’s seat at the beginning of Pacific Rim 2, then del Toro is going to be challenged to evolve the series a bit more than I think a lot of people were anticipating when they thought this was just going to be Robo Punch 2: Maximum Punch Force.
Whether that’s a good or bad thing is also a matter of perspective, but you can be sure that we’ll all have the chance to hear much more from del Toro about Pacific Rim 2 before we have to decide whether we’ll throw our money at the screen.
Via Collider
