Guillermo Del Toro revealed how different his version of Pacific Rim 2 was going to be. Released in 2013, Pacific Rim was a moderate hit for Warner Bros. picture that made $101 million domestically but worldwide brought in $411 million. Universal Pictures took over distribution of the sequel, and while Del Toro originally planned to stay on he eventually stepped away to direct The Shape of Water with Steven S. DeKnight taking over the directing duties on the sequel now titled Pacific Rim: Uprising.
Pacific Rim: Uprising was released five years after the original film and scored a lower critical reaction than the first film and was a box office bomb, grossing $290 million worldwide, roughly a little more than $100 million less than its predecessor. Del Toro's decision to helm The Shape of Water paid off as he won Best Director and Best Picture at the 90th Academy Awards. Del Toro's next film is Nightmare Alley, set to open on December 17, 2021, and in 2022 will see the release of his adaptation of Pinocchio, which will arrive on Netflix.
In an interview with The Wrap to promote Nightmare Alley, del Toro shed some details on his plans for Pacific Rim 2 and teased a very different film than what was released. Del Toro said audiences would have discovered the precursors, the ones who control the kaijus, were in fact humans from the distant future. He also intended Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) to be the lead of the film.
"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. 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...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”
It appears most of the elements from del Toro's pitch for Pacific Rim 2 were scrapped, as Mako Mori was killed early on in Pacific Rim: Uprising. Some elements were reworked, as the idea of a human getting manipulated by the precursors was reworked into turning one of the previous film's heroes, Newt Geiszler (Charlie Day) into the villain who was under the influence of the Kaiju creators. This plot point was revealed back during the making of the original film, though. While Pacific Rim: Uprising ended with a cliffhanger sequel set up, there did not seem to be any indication the film would have a time travel component to it.
Del Toro's original idea for Pacific Rim 2 of making the creators of the kaiju turn out to be humans would have tied into a line from the first film which was also a title for one of the songs on the soundtrack 'To Fight Monsters, We Created Monster.' That future humans create kaiju to save their own future, for their present-day ancestors to create their own monsters to fight their future. It is a rich complex idea that is fitting for a filmmaker like del Toro, and while it would be nice to imagine that one day these themes will be explored, del Toro has ruled out a Pacific Rim 3 anytime soon.
Source: The Wrap
