Kaiju History — What Exactly Went Wrong With ‘Pacific Rim 2’?
Few filmmakers made a significant long-lasting splash into kaiju cinema with one film the way Guillermo Del Toro did, but few filmmakers are like Del Toro. The eccentric visionary doesn’t stray far from fantasy or creature features, yet somehow manages to dip his toes into different genres piece by piece with each and every film. For a guy who specializes in hellish monsters, he inserts a lot of grounded character drama, and often in historical settings.
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With Pacific Rim, he went futuristic and, while still bringing compelling human stories to the fore, forged one of the best man vs. giant monster films ever seen. Inspired by Tokusatsu, the film was like an anime come to life in all its cyberpunk glory with vivid colors to match. Given its budget (almost $200 million), it was a bit of a box-office disappointment, but a sequel was pretty much guaranteed.
However, Del Toro didn’t return and the follow-up we ended up getting, similar to the third Hellboy, wasn’t what fans expected. Pacific Rim: Uprising went bigger as a film and, worse, as a disappointment relative to its $150-$180M budget. As is so often the case in these strolls down ‘Film Memory Lane,’ we have to ask ourselves what happened? How did what looked like a sure thing for a big-budget movie franchise fail to get off the ground the way the MonsterVerse did?
The answers are more varied than you might think. Everybody has their reasons, especially Del Toro, who put the blame on the studio. To be fair, he was committed to The Shape of Water and that commitment paid dividends, but Del Toro was relying on people above his pay grade to get the required soundstage space in time. “We were getting ready to do it, it was different from the first, but it had a continuation of many of the things that I was trying to do,” he recalled in a 2023 interview with Collider.
“Then what happened is — I mean, this is why life’s crazy, right? — they had to give a deposit for the stages at 5 p.m. or we would lose the stages in Toronto for many months. So, I said, ‘Don’t forget we’re gonna lose the stages,’ and five o’clock came and went, and we lost the stages. They said, ‘Well, we can shoot it in China.’ And I go, ‘What do you mean we?’ [Laughs] ‘I’ve gotta go do Shape of Water,’” Del Toro added.
As they say, ‘You had one job!’ And because the suits didn’t do theirs, the sequel went in a different direction than Del Toro intended. Although, (again, to be fair) he might not have known exactly what he was going to do either. What he had in mind for the supposed “Pacific Rim: Maelstrom” was “paradoxical” and “really crazy.” “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,” he told The Wrap in 2021.
“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,” del Toro explained. “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,” Del Toro continued.
Something similar played out in Pacific Rim: Uprising when Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day), a returning character from the first one, was corrupted by his drifts with a fragment of Kaiju brain. This decision didn’t go over well with a lot of fans (I certainly didn’t understand it), which seems to be the refrain for Uprising between the killing of Mako (Rinko Kikuchi) and the pivot to a new main character, Jake Pentecost (John Boyega).
However, even that last bit wasn’t originally in the cards. Pentecost’s insertion was a last-minute rewrite forced on director and new writer Steven S. DeKnight. Charlie Hunnam, star of the Del Toro film, was attached initially, but scheduling made his return unfeasible. “I was offered the job. Hard to say no to a 150 million dollar movie! All went sideways right when we lost Charlie Hunnam (wonderful guy – his passion project, a remake of Papillon, got the go ahead and shot the same time we did),” DeKnight explained on X.
His planned storyline was thrown out and he didn’t have much time to come up with something else. “We had to throw out most of the completed script, which centered on original characters Raleigh and Herc as jaeger pilot partners. Not enough time to really get new script in shape and properly prep before filming began,” DeKnight added (via Movie Web). “A tale as old as Hollywood! However, still very thankful for the opportunity. Learned a lot and hope to apply that on my next feature.”
Pacific Rim: Uprising was a disappointment for everyone, not just fans. Del Toro won’t even watch it. “I didn’t see the final movie because that’s like watching home movies from your ex-wife,” he revealed in Collider conversation. “It is terrible if they’re good and worse if they’re bad, or the opposite. You don’t wanna know. So, I didn’t see it. I did read the final script, and it was very different. Some of the elements were the same but very different.”
Pacific Rim still became a franchise with an anime sequel, Pacific Rim: The Black, and a prequel in development at Amazon, but we’re still left to wonder what could have been with the divisive sequel.
NEXT: Kaiju History — Godzilla Never Fought Gamera Because Toho Hated The Idea
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