We’ve known for a while that at least one Pacific Rim sequel is in active development, with another still bubbling away in director Guillermo del Toro’s mind. But what of the next film, headed our way in 2017? Del Toro, doing the press rounds for the Blu-ray release of The Strain, seems ready to share a few details about what we can expect.
So when does the story for the second **Pacific Rim **film fit into the timeline? “It’s a few years after the first one,” says del Toro. “It’s not an immediate follow-up. It is the world having been freed of Kaiju, what happens to the world after – what happens to the Jaeger technology once the Kaiju are not a threat. It’s quite a jump.”
Don’t worry, it won’t be entirely giant beastie free: we’re not going to be spending the film with Jaeger crews forming a rounders league or using their machines as a giant Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots set. But the focus will be on that post-Kaiju world initially, and del Toro has figured out that Charlie Day’s Newton Geiszler and Burn Gorman’s Gottlieb, the two squabbling scientists from the original, will definitely return.
“I think that two of our main characters like in the first one are Burn and Charlie.They are probably the guys I have the most fun writing, along with Hannibal Chau, so just from a purely selfish drive, I like writing them,” the director admits. “You’re gonna get a lot of that, but the Kaijus are very different and you’re gonna see a very different type of the robots I think. It’s gonna be quite a different adventure.” As for the likes of Charlie Hunnam’s Raleigh Becket and Rinko Kikuchi’s Mako Mori? We’ll have to wait and see. Perhaps they’ll be the focus of the third film, assuming that comes to pass...
Pacific Rim 2 is scheduled to stomp all over our cinemas on April 7, 2017.