Writer details the Pacific Rim sequel that never was

You always got the idea that Warner Bros. wanted Pacific Rim to be a bigger deal than it ended up being. The original 2013 movie had a ton going for it: robots vs monsters action, an appealing cast, a visionary director in Guillermo del Toro at the helm…It seemed poised for success, and indeed, the movie did pretty good at the box office, albeit mainly outside of the United States. Still, it did well enough to warrant a sequel: Pacific Rim: Uprising.

But that sequel didn’t do as well, possibly because the original creatives weren’t as involved. Del Toro couldn’t direct because of scheduling conflicts, devoting himself instead to The Shape of Water, which is awesome, so no hard feelings there. Travis Beacham, who wrote the script for the original movie with del Toro, handed his treatment off to a succession of other writers. By the time the second came out in 2018, it didn’t look much like what Beacham and originally intended.

What did they intend? Beacham, who’s currently making the rounds talking about his new Amazon show Carnival Row, shared some insight with SlashFilm:

"I talked to Guillermo about it early on, because there were a ton of crazy ideas for where it could go. We definitely wanted to do a film that took place on the other side of the rift and see what that would be like. I don’t know if you could just jump right in and do that, but maybe after a few movies. Personally, I always really wanted to see a prequel. I’m not big on prequels when it comes to other properties, but I thought it’d be fun to go back and see the first Jaegar and first fight with the Kaiju. I wanted to see what that would’ve looked like from the beginning."

If you’ve forgotten, the rift is the tear in reality through which the monstrous kaiju monsters pour. We didn’t travel to the other side in the sequel, nor did we get a prequel to the original movie. Writing on Twitter last year, del Toro confirmed that the sequel script he wrote with Beacham was indeed “very different” from what ended up onscreen:

Series come and series go. We’ll probably never know exactly what del Toro and Beacham had planned for a Pacific Rim follow-up, but the franchise is still kicking, with Netflix having announced an anime series that will follow two young siblings who pilot an abandoned Jaeger across a hostile landscape to search for their missing parents. And if del Toro ever feels like taking another crack at the giant robot genre, fans will be waiting.

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h/t SyFy Wire