Guillermo del Toro is doing the interview circuit to promote his upcoming movie, Nightmare Alley, and the world is better for it. In a recent interview, the director talked about what he described as his “really crazy” idea for the sequel to Pacific Rim (pictured above), the mecha-kaiju battle extravaganza he directed that starred Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi.
In an interview with The Wrap, del Toro revealed the twist he wanted to put in the sequel:
“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.”
You read that right—del Toro’s vision for the sequel would have included time travel that would have pit contemporary humans in mechas against future humans controlling kaijus because what is space and time, really? The sequel to Pacific Rim, eventually called Pacific Rim: Uprising, did ultimately get made but alas didn’t include time travel shenanigans. It also didn’t include much of Kikuchi’s character, Mako Mori, something del Toro said would have been different in his version as well. “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,” he said.
Alas, del Toro’s vision never made it to the screen, but his Pacific Rim sequel will always live on in our imagination and/or some alternative future reality.
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