A decade ago Guillermo del Toro made a big monsters vs. big robots movie. It was called Pacific Rim. It did pretty well — well enough that it got a sequel a handful of years later. That one wasn’t directed by del Toro. That’s fine, because instead he made The Shape of Water, which won him Best Picture and Best Director. But why didn’t del Toro make it? Massive artistic clashes? Some behind-the-scenes drama? Actually the reason is a lot dopier than you’d think.
“We were getting ready to do it, it was different from the first, but it had a continuation of many of the things that I was trying to do,” Del Toro said in a recent interview with Collider (as caught by Entertainment Weekly). “Then what happened is — I mean, this is why life’s crazy, right? — they had to give a deposit for the stages at 5 p.m. or we would lose the stages in Toronto for many months. So I said, ‘Don’t forget, we’re going to lose the stages,’ and 5 o’clock came and went, and we lost the stages.”
Luckily there was a Plan B. Unluckily that didn’t work with del Toro’s schedule: “They said, ‘Well, we can shoot it in China.’ And I go, ‘What do you mean we?’ [laughs] ‘I’ve got to go do Shape of Water.'”
Again, in the end it all worked out for del Toro, though not quite for the Pacific Rim gang. When the sequel (helmed by Daredevil show director Steven DeKnight) came out, it scored so-so reviews and middling box office, effectively killing plans for a threequel. (There was an anime version for Netflix in 2021, though.) It also didn’t exactly get del Toro’s blessing.
“I didn’t see the final movie, because that’s like watching home movies from your ex-wife,” he told Collider. “It is terrible if they’re good and worse if they’re bad, or the opposite. You don’t want to know.”
