Guillermo del Toro Says Pacific Rim 2 Will Lead to a Third Movie

October 17, 2014

By the end of Pacific Rim, our heroes Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) had successfully sealed the breach and saved humanity FOREVER or perhaps not. Doing his damnedest to open a new portal to that alien world is director Guillermo del Toro, who is hard at work with screenwriter Zak Penn on crafting Pacific Rim 2, and he’s given Collider an update on the sequel and the sequel after that. That’s right, there will be a third one.

“The direction we’re going in is very different from the first,” del Toro divulges. “All I can say is some of your favorite characters come back, some others don’t because we have decided that we’re going to shoot ambitiously and say ‘Let’s hope we have three movies,’so some characters come in at the end of the second, hoping that it will ramp up on the third one. I hope people like it but you’re gonna get a very different experience from the first one.”

Given that we never got a Hellboy 3, it’s very optimistic of del Toro to save characters for a rainy day. Who will be left out of the fun? Will Hunnam be replaced by a new leading man only to show up in the final minutes to save the day? What about Charlie Day’s dorky scientist Newt being revealed as the master villain, as Day himself has suggested? Or it could be Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost, who told Mako rather Obi-Wan-like, “You can always find me in the drift!”

Currently working on a second season of FX’s “The Strain,” putting the finishing touches on 2015’s Crimson Peak and working on that mysterious esoteric black & white film of his, del Toro has still managed to crack the script for Pac Rim 2 with a very specific timetable.

“We got the first draft of the movie now, and we are going to spend another 4-5 months on the screenplay before we start pre-production,” del Toro confirmed. “We start pre-production next year in August-September and start shooting November-December next year.”

To be released by Universal (instead of Warner Bros.) through their deal with Legendary Pictures, Pacific Rim 2 currently has an April 7, 2017 release date.