Del Toro At Work On PACIFIC RIM 2 Screenplay

If you feel that there wasn’t enough giant monster action in this summer’s Godzilla but you haven’t seen Pacific Rim from last summer, then you really should check it out. Director Guillermo Del Toro saga of invading giant monsters being battled back with giant, human-controlled robots really delivered on that front. And Del Toro may be giving us more of that spectacle. We’ve known for a while that he has been entertaining the notion of a sequel, but we now know a little bit more as to who he may be working on that idea with.

While doing some publicity for the upcoming television series The Strain which he is producing, Del Toro stated to BuzzFeed that actual work is being done on a screenplay and revealed who he is working with on it.

I’m working very, very hard with Zak Penn. We’ve been working for a few months now in secret. We found a way to twist it around. Travis Beacham [co-writer of the first film, now working on Fox’s Hieroglyph] was involved in the storyline and now I’m writing with Zak because Travis has become a TV mogul.

If Penn’s name doesn’t ring a bell, you should know that he had his hands in the X-Men 2, The Incredible Hulk, and pre-Joss Whedon rewrites The Avengers screenplay. He also has Inspector Gadget, Elektra, and X-Men: The Last Stand on his resume, so there’s that.

Del Toro was mum on what the storyline for the sequel would be, however he did state that Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi characters of Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori would be returning. He did rule out that it would be a prequel, stating that he “was never interested” in telling the story of the initial alien invasion.

Previously, Del Toro hinted that a second film may focus on the invading kaiju using some of the Earth technology that was left behind in their dimension during the finale of the first film. He also stated that “the Drift,” the psychic connection between the two operators of the giant jaegers which was also briefly established between a scientist and a portion of a kaiju brain, will also play an important part on what may come.

Of course, Del Toro hasn’t been given a greenlight for the project yet. The director himself stated, “I don’t have the money, but I’m proceeding like it is happening.”

The film itself did reasonably well at the box office, mostly boosted by a foreign gross three ties what it earned here in the US. But with Godzilla currently tearing up the box office I would be surprised if the suits at the studio weren’t looking for other properties that they already have that they could use to cash in on people’s obvious excitement for giant monsters and the like smashing cities.