Guillermo del Toro has revealed his original plans for Pacific Rim 2 that were ultimately scrapped.
The first movie, directed by del Toro, was released in 2013 and is set in a version of the future where humanity is at war with the kaiju, huge sea monsters who have emerged from a portal in the Pacific Ocean.
Del Toro wrote a script for a sequel, but, by the time 2018’s Pacific Rim: Uprising was in the works, Steven S. DeKnight had taken over the director’s chair and the script had been replaced. So, what could have been?
“The villain was this tech guy that had invented basically sort of the internet 2.0,” del Toro said in a recent interview with The Wrap (opens in new tab). “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. 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.”
The director also added that he wanted the sequel to focus more on Mako Mori, played by Rinko Kikuchi. “To me, the hero was Mako Mori,” he said. “I wanted her not only to live, I wanted her to be one of the main characters in the second movie.”
Del Toro’s next movie, Nightmare Alley, arrives in theaters on December 17 in the US and January 21 in the UK. In the meantime, fill out your watch list with our picks of the best Netflix movies to stream right now.