With a release date already announced for PACIFIC RIM 2, when might Guillermo del Toro start filming for his “very different” sequel? In an interview with Collider, del Toro says he will start shooting PACIFIC RIM 2 in the fourth quarter of 2015. But the production start date wasn’t the only thing the director revealed during his conversation with the site. Del Toro also says he’s hopeful there will be a third PACIFIC RIM flick.
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. The direction we’re going in is very different from the first. All I can say is some 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. I hope people like it, but you’re going to get a very different experience from the first one.
I’d say that’s pretty damn ambitious. Although PACIFIC RIM did gross over $400 million worldwide, only a little over $100 million of that came from domestic theaters. I’m not sure if the sequel will do any better in domestic theaters, especially with it being released almost four years after the first one, but I’m certainly interested in seeing PACIFIC RIM 2, as well as the planned third movie. What are your thoughts on a PACIFIC RIM trilogy?
PACIFIC RIM 2 is scheduled to be released on April 7, 2017.