Pacific Rim may have been a modest hit in the summer of 2013, but it managed to do, excuse me, monster business around the world, leaving Legendary to push forth on a sequel. Director Guillermo del Toro is hard at work on the follow up and while doing some press for the upcoming animated feature The Book Of Life which he produced, he managed to drop a few comments about Pacific Rim 2, the animated series that is planned to bridge the gap between the first film and the sequel and what may lie beyond.
Speaking to Collider del Toro stated –
We got the first draft of the movie now, and we are going to spend another 4-5 months on the screenplay before we start pre-production. We start pre-production next year in August-September and start shooting November-December next year.
A winter 2015/2016 shoot will still give del Toro and crew over a year to finish the movie in time for its scheduled April 7, 2017 release, whioh suggests that the film will be very visual effects intensive. But then again, I don’t think any one of us was expecting an intimate little chamber drama, were we?
As for which characters will be coming back for a second round of giant robots versus monsters, del Toro remained a bit coy, but hinted that if a favorite wasn’t in 2 there was still a chance that they would appear in a third film.
[S]ome of your favorite characters come back, some others don’t because we have decided that we’re going to shoot ambitiously and say ‘Let’s hope we have three movies,’ so some characters come in at the end of the second, hoping that it will ramp up on the third one.
Granted, the lack of a Hellboy 3 blu-ray on my shelf does point to del Toro’s luck in getting a third franchise installment happening in the past. Hopefully, he will have better luck this time around.
