Sometimes when I hear about a director or a studio talking about making a sequel to a film that hasn't even been released yet I want to tell them to slow the hell down. Not every film needs to be franchised and every movie doesn't need to have a sequel, regardless of how profitable it may be. A sequel to PACIFIC RIM though? Yeah, I could probably get behind that.
EW spoke to director Guillermo Del Toro recently about his upcoming film and the director shared that after screening the film for the first time, Legendary Entertainment CEO Thomas Tull told Del Toro to start working on a sequel.
He said, ‘Do you think you can come up with a great idea?’ ” del Toro remembers. “I said, ‘F—, yeah!’ ! Because on the way to the finished screenplay, there were entire angles and ideas that we chopped off because they were too much."
PACIFIC RIM shares some similarities with the GODZILLA franchise but in the interview Del Toro says he doesn't want to follow how that series did their sequels, meaning he doesn't want to just introduce new monsters and call it a day. Instead Del Toro wants to focus on the Kaiju race itself:
"They’re a race of blind consumers grabbing planets, consuming them, and moving to the next,” says del Toro. “The idea [with the sequel] is to explore a little bit of that. I won’t spoil it, but I don’t think we’ll repeat a single beat from the first movie."
Unfortunately Guillermo Del Toro says that if a sequel was to happen it won't be in theaters anytime soon:
"It will take us a while to develop,” del Toro says. “I don’t think the screenplay will come out so quick. It took us a year and a half to do this script, and It’ll take us at least two years to develop the other script.”
So we're looking at what…2016 at the absolute earliest? Del Toro sometimes gets a little too excited about a project that isn't 100% confirmed, which means a lot of disappointed fanboys. However there's a very good chance a sequel will get made for PACIFIC RIM even though Del Toro has quite a bit on his plate already. If the film makes a ton of money though I guarantee you Legendary and Warner Bros. will offer Del Toro the moon (or a mountain perhaps?) to get a sequel made.
PACIFIC RIM is in theaters July 12th, 2013.