Guillermo Del Toro Reveals His Scrapped Original Story For Pacific Rim 2
Guillermo del Toro might be on a media blitz for his new noir movie "Nightmare Alley," but he doesn't seem to have any problems dishing about his older projects, specifically the sci-fi monster mash that was "Pacific Rim." The director talked openly about his idea for a sequel to the 2013 film and it sounds pretty wild. Would the "Pacific Rim" still be flourishing if del Toro was able to make his sequel? Would it have kicked off a serious sci-fi monster movie trend? Would we be living in a world with way more "Pacific Rim" Funko Pops? We'll never know, but we can at the very least imagine what the sequel would look like because del Toro really laid it all out.
If you have crystal clear memories of 2018, you might be thinking, "Wait a minute, there was a 'Pacific Rim' sequel!" And you would be right because "Pacific Rim: Uprising" was very much released that year, but it was missing one key aspect: Guillermo del Toro himself. He was working on a sequel to the first film with screenwriter Zak Penn in 2013, but after some casual studio shuffling he was replaced by Steven DeKnight, and "Uprising" was released in 2018.
Add a Dash of Time Travel
In an interview with The Wrap, del Toro explained the general plot points for his version of the sequel, saying:
"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."
Yes, you read that correctly. There would be some wild "Battlestar Galactica"-esque time travel/timeline nonsense in his dream sequel. A classic "humanity is its own worst enemy" lesson. Of course, in a delightful del Toro movie, the weirdness doesn't stop there. If he got his way, del Toro was really going to expand on the Precursors' evil plans. As he explains it:
"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."
If you remember the plot of "Pacific Rim: Uprising" better than I did, you might recognize some of those plot points! As del Toro admits in the interview, some elements of his original storyline did make their way into the official sequel, including the Precursors' plan to terraform the earth. It also seems like they reconstituted the evil inventor/tech guy into Newt Geiszler's evil scientist/drone creator for "Uprising," but hey, they're all just riffs off of Faust anyway, right? A thirst for knowledge can only lead you down one path, making a deal with the more evil version of your past/future self. It's a tale as old as time.
And a Sprinkle of Mako Mori
One of the other revelations from del Toro's interview with The Wrap was that he wanted Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), the Jaeger pilot with a heart of gold from the first film, to be the main character in the sequel. Mori is killed off in "Uprising," but it sounds like del Toro was pretty passionate about her place in the "Pacific Rim" story, saying:
"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."
Same here, buddy. Same here.