Guillermo Del Toro achieved one of his pet projects in 2013 with Pacific Rim, a film that saw him bring a love of giant robot and kaiju battles to the big screen. However, while fans dug it and the reviews were generally pretty good, it was an expensive movie that made just over $400M worldwide. It took a while for a sequel to be announced, and in 2018 we got it with Pacific Rim Uprising, but…Del Toro was only a producer on it, as Steven S. DeKnight took over as director. Fans have always wondered what happened with that, and now Del Toro provides a pretty simple, albeit lame, answer to Collider.
“We were getting ready to do it, it was different from the first, but it had a continuation of many of the things that I was trying to do. Then what happened is – I mean, this is why life’s crazy, right? – they had to give a deposit for the stages at 5pm or we would lose the stages in Toronto for many months. So, I said, ‘Don’t forget we’re gonna lose the stages,’ and five o’clock came and went, and we lost the stages. They said, ‘Well, we can shoot it in China.’ And I go, ‘What do you mean we?’ [Laughs] ‘I’ve gotta go do Shape of Water.'”
That sucks, right? Because some studio jerks were off the ball, we didn’t get to see what Del Toro could’ve done with a sequel, which he revealed would’ve included a role for Donnie Yen! Oh well. The sequel performed poorly at the box office with just $290M, and received worse reviews despite the casting of John Boyega and Cailee Spaeny, two fan favorites.
Del Toro won’t bring himself to watch the sequel, either, despite being a producer on it…
“I didn’t see the final movie because that’s like watching home movies from your ex-wife. It is terrible if they’re good and worse if they’re bad, or the opposite. You don’t wanna know. So, I didn’t see it. I did read the final script, and it was very different. Some of the elements were the same but very different.”
Honestly, I kinda like Pacific Rim Uprising but Del Toro isn’t really missing anything. The franchise continued on in an animated Netflix series that lasted two seasons, concluding in 2022.
