As the summer movie season chugs along with its endless procession of superhero movies, bawdy comedies and animated extravaganzas, “Pacific Rim,” a brand new sci-fi property from director Guillermo del Toro, increasingly looks like it will be one of the bright spots on the schedule – it’s a go-for-broke epic about giant monsters that crawl out of the Pacific Ocean and the human-piloted giant robots that are called upon to fight them. (You know, the kind of story we can all relate to.) Well, today we’ve got a brand new TV spot for the monster mash, along with del Toro spilling details about what we can expect from the sequel, if this one turns out to be a graveyard smash.
The TV spot features some new imagery (like a giant foot smashing down in what appears to be Tokyo) but is mostly culled from the previous trailers, along with voiceover that explains the general conceit of the movie (“in order to fight monsters, we had to create monsters of our own”) and the movie’s regrettably lame tagline: “Go big or go extinct” (um what?) The footage remains impressive – the giant, “Godzilla“-like monsters are dazzlingly well designed, as are the giant robots, which are piloted by some of the human cast (including Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, and Rinko Kikuchi). What’s more – the movie looks rough, with rain beating down on the robots and the monsters leaping up and attacking both cities and robots.
Thankfully, should the movie prove to be a hit, del Toro has already started thinking about the potential sequel. According to Entertainment Weekly, Legendary Entertainment CEO Thomas Hull, who co-produced the movie with Warner Bros, gave del Toro the go-ahead at the film’s first preview screening. “He said, ‘Do you think you can come up with a great idea?’ I said, ‘Fuck, yeah!’ Because on the way to the finished screenplay, there were entire angles and ideas that we chopped off because they were too much,” del Toro explained. For the sequel, the director intends to explore what is waiting on the other side of the inter-dimensional rift, looking at the alien forces sending in the monsters to attack earth. “They’re a race of blind consumers grabbing planets, consuming them, and moving to the next,” del Toro told EW. “The idea [with the sequel] is to explore a little bit of that. I won’t spoil it, but I don’t think we’ll repeat a single beat from the first movie.”
Just don’t expect the follow-up anytime soon: not only is del Toro working on his gothic romance “Crimson Peak,” but he always has a half dozen projects on the backburner ready for deployment (including DC’s “Justice League Dark” project). Plus, he says, the first script took a while to develop and the second one won’t come any easier. “I don’t think the screenplay will come out so quick,” del Toro said. “It took us a year and a half to do this script, and it’ll take us at least two years to develop the other script.”
