Guillermo del Toro is a busy man with the kinds of projects he’s involved with but it also means that he gets out in front of the press fairly regularly. With him out doing a fe winterviews for next month’s debut of The Strain on FX, naturally questions turned towards Pacific Rim from some journalists who wanted to know more. That had him providing the surprising news that there is some actual progress on the script for a sequel.
“I’m working very, very hard with Zak Penn. We’ve been working for a few months now in secret. We found a way to twist it around. Travis Beacham [co-writer of the first film, now working on Fox’s Hieroglyph] was involved in the storyline and now I’m writing with Zak because Travis has become a TV mogul.”
“Some people were wondering if we were going to do the prequel. I was never interested in doing that first wave of invasion. I’m going for very new, very crazy ideas on the second one, which are very different from the first one — but you will get really great spectacle.”
With the first film doing $411 million worldwide on its $190 million budget, and with Legendary having moved from Warner Bros. to Universal, there wasn’t much hope for a sequel to be made. But there’s also the tidbits that came from a recent interview with Legendary CEO Thomas Tull on why there’s potential with it according to I Am Rogue:
On another subject, there’s a rumor that Legendary is working on a Pacific Rim 2. Can you confirm or deny that?
Tull: Here’s the deal. We’re very close with Guillermo. He’s doing Crimson Peak for us right now. With the amount of money that we did on Pacific Rim, over $400 million, it didn’t quite hit our expectations, but it did better than a lot of other films. If there’s another great story to tell with Guillermo then we’re all over it because we think it’s really hard to create one of these things from scratch. The movie did really well on home video and merchandise, and it certainly has a big international following. We’re not just going to do Pacific Rim 2 just to do it. Right now we’re talking to Guillermo del Toro. If we can crack the story, we all think it’s great, and it’s him at the helm, then fantastic. But right now there’s nothing going on officially to proclaim.
[Source: Collider]
