“There were a ton of crazy ideas for where it could go.” Pacific Rim sequel was supposed to look very different before the $290 million flop was created
The Pacific Rim sequel was a failure, but it could have looked very different if the creators of the first part had taken on the project and implemented their ideas.
It's no secret that Pacific Rim: Uprising disappointed the expectations of fans of the sci-fi series, which they came to love after Guillermo del Toro's film. Compared to the first part, the world in Uprising doesn't seem as vivid, the story presented doesn't know itself what exactly it wants to be, and on top of that, the film by Steven S. DeKnight also lacks its own character.
The first science fiction movie is given a melancholy tone thanks to the fact that the film is dark and gloomy – thus sensing how dark times have come in the world and how desperate humanity has become. Del Toro's film is a hopeful story about how people are struggling for a better tomorrow. Second one, on the other hand, is hard to say what it wanted to be.
The negative audience reception was reflected in the box office performance of Pacific Rim: Uprising, which, despite raising $290 million, failed to achieve profitability on a budget of $150 million. The sequel to the sci-fi blockbuster is therefore regarded in many ways as a failure, which perhaps could have been avoided if one of the original plans for the second part of the series had been realized.
Travis Beacham, co-writer of Pacific Rim, who worked on the film with Guillermo del Toro, talked in an interview with SlashFilm about what ideas they had for continuing the series before the 2018 production was in the hands of other filmmakers.
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.
Both of these proposals differed from what was ultimately produced. It's impossible to say whether either version would have actually been more successful than Uprising, but fans of the series would certainly have liked it if the creators of the first film had been able to continue working on Pacific Rim, which unfortunately didn't happen, as Guillermo del Toro couldn’t direct the sequel due to a scheduling conflict. He was working on The Shape of Water at the time.
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