Guillermo del Toro sets expectations with the Pacific Rim animated series

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

PACIFIC RIM defines the popcorn movie for me. It has everything you’d ever want that the Transformers and Godzilla films don’t deliver. So color me baffled (it’s a color) when that film didn’t come close to the box office numbers that the other two franchises did. When the announcement came that we were getting a PACIFIC RIM 2, I was ecstatic. Del Toro created a fascinating universe in which I felt we were only scratching the surface of. The idea to do an animated series to help flesh out that world works for me, and del Toro had a few things to say about it.

In regards to how far along the process is:

We are right now in the middle of talking and negotiating with a few Japanese companies for the animation. We are talking to a couple of showrunners that have a strong animation background, casting the writers room. What’s great is it’s a great set-up and a link between the first movie and the second movie. It really enhances the mythology of the characters; we have cameos of characters from the first movie, but mostly it’s a new set of characters. New jaegers, except for one or two, and new kaijus. It’s really fun.

What we can expect as far as stories go:

We’re going for a long arc, so the idea is to show a group of characters—we have pilots, functional jaegers, but we have all these younger characters. I really want to explore things that are complimentary to the things that I want to explore in the second movie: drift, what drifting does to you, what is needed to drift, a lot of stuff that I think is important, but also the jaeger technology, the kaijus being evolved, ideas about the precursors—the guys that control the kaijus. We have a lot of leeway in 13 episodes and I wanna make it sort of in the same spirit of Pacific Rim, which is the ideal audience for Pacific Rim was young—very young, 11-year-olds and so forth—but with really beautiful design and stories that make these characters interesting in a way that I found them interesting in, for example, Year Zero, the graphic novel that we did. And I think that’s the basic thrust of the thing.

If the animated series is a success:

If it connects we’ll go on [to another season], but the thing is I don’t want it to be weekly adventures. I don’t want it to be like Chapter One is a little action thing and it gets resolved in 40 minutes or an hour and then the next episode, [like] nothing happened. My favorite anime series always have a long arc.

In regards to what channel or internet outlet this may premier on:

Legendary is talking to a few outlets so I’d rather not disclose myself. The way we set up The Strain was to talk to everyone, literally, on the map, and then find who’s response we sort of jibe with the most. I think in this series, it would be great to find a place that can give it a proper presentation and can advertise the creation of the series. So we’re open to being pleasantly surprised everywhere.

I’m remaining cautiously optimistic, in that as much as I want to have the world of PACIFIC RIM fleshed out, I also don’t want the skewing towards a young audience to undermine the material. As long as Guillermo keeps a firm grip on that bad boy, I’ll be okay. After all, I wasn’t expecting to get any more from this world and now we have a sequel and animated series. I really have very little to complain about.

PACIFIC RIM 2 is currently scheduled for an April 7, 2017 release.

And now to get this theme, created by Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi, stuck in your head all day.