Pacific Rim 2: Charlie Hunnam won’t return for the sequel

Bad news if you were hoping that Raleigh Becket might be back for a little drifting with a fellow pilot and some fresh Kaiju-battering... Charlie Hunnam has revealed that he won't be part of Pacific Rim 2.

Talking with Yahoo Movies at this weekend's Comic-Con (where he was promoting Guy Ritchie's King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword), Hunnam revealed that he had been approached by producer Guillermo del Toro and director Steven S. DeKnight to return, and that initial drafts of the script featured his character considerably. Sadly, it's not the Kaiju threat keeping him from returning, but the age-old problem of scheduling issues. Still, he seems excited to see that the Pacific Rim story will continue.

John Boyega is the lead for the new movie, snagging both the lead role and planning to be a producer. And del Toro has said that the sequel will be expanding the universe of Pacific Rim, blending with other planned stories. "If and when the animated series happens, we are mixing them. In fact the sequel takes some ideas that we created for the animated series originally," del Toro told The Hollywood Reporter{ =nofollow}. " I think we need to let the live-action lead. When we went with Steven we showed him everything we were developing and he said, ‘I like this from this universe, I like this from this element, I want to bring them into the movie.’ It’s easy to expand cause you have not only the Jaeger-human universe and the Kaiju-alien universe, but (also) the fact that you are now able to play in a very history-filled universe. We started the war with the Kaiju, we won the war with the Kaiju and now it’s a postwar of those two universes."

Pacific Rim 2 (or Pacific Rim: Maelstrom, if it ends up using that title) is currently scheduled to bring the robots vs monsters action back to our screens on February 23, 2018. As for Hunnam, watch the first trailer for King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword.