Guillermo del Toro’s original Pacific Rim sequel involved time travel, more Mako Mori

Last Updated on December 15, 2021

Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim took place in the future when Earth is under attack by Kaiju, giant monsters that crawl out of an interdimensional portal in the Pacific Ocean. In order to fight back, humanity created the Jaegers, giant mechs that were controlled by two co-pilots whose minds were joined in a process called drifting. Pacific Rim was a hell of a lot of fun and it didn’t take long before a sequel was a very real possibility. Unfortunately, there were a series of delays as the project changed distributors and Guillermo del Toro wound up stepping away, leaving the Pacific Rim sequel to be directed by Steven DeKnight.

Pacific Rim: Uprising didn’t end up being nearly as successful as the first film, and while speaking with The Wrap, Guillermo del Toro dropped a few details on his original idea for the Pacific Rim sequel.

The villain was this tech guy that had invented basically sort of the internet 2.0. And then they realized that all his patents came to him one morning. And so little by little, they started putting together this and they said, ‘Oh, he got them from the precursors.’ The guys that control the kaiju. And then we found out that the precursors are us thousands of years in the future. They’re trying to terraform, trying to re-harvest the earth to survive. Wow. And that we were in exo-bio-suits that looked alien, but they were not. We were inside. And it was a really interesting paradox.

Although Steven DeKnight’s Pacific Rim sequel did wind up repurposing a few of those ideas, it seems that Guillermo del Toro had something much crazier in mind. Another big difference was that Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) would have had a major role this time instead of being unceremoniously killed off, a move that angered a lot of fans. “To me, the hero was Mako Mori. I wanted her not only to live, I wanted her to be one of the main characters in the second movie,” del Toro said.

Guillermo del Toro’s latest film, Nightmare Alley, is set to be released in theaters on December 17th. You can check out a review of the film from our own JimmyO right here.