Guillermo del Toro Announces Plans for Third 'Pacific Rim'
11:09 AM PDT 10/17/2014 by Graeme McMillan

Guillermo del Toro isn’t thinking small with the follow-up to his 2013 Kaiju movie Pacific Rim — in fact, he’s thinking so big that one movie won’t be enough for what he’s got planned.

“The direction we’re going is very different from the first [movie],” the director told Collider. “All I can say is that some of your favorite characters come back, some others don’t, because we have decided that we’re going to shoot ambitiously and say, ‘let’s hope we have three movies.’ So some characters come in at the end of the second, hoping that it will ramp up on the third one. I hope people like it, but you’re going to get a very different experience from the first one.”

A third Pacific Rim movie is just the latest expansion of the nascent franchise. Earlier this year, del Toro announced plans for an animated series based on the movie, in addition to continuing the comic book adventures of the Jaeger pilots as previously seen in the Pacific Rim: Tales from Year Zero graphic novel written by the movie’s Travis Beachum.

Del Toro also gave Collider an update on the production schedule for the second cinematic installment. “We’ve got the first draft of the [screenplay] now,” he said, “and we are going to spend another four, five months on the screenplay before we start pre-production. We start pre-production next year in August, September, and we start shooting November, December next year.”
Pacific Rim 2 is scheduled for release Apr. 7, 2017.

All I can say is that some of your favorite characters come back

It’s a few years after the first one. It’s not an immediate follow-up. It is the world having been freed of Kaiju, what happens to the world after – what happens to the Jaeger technology once the Kaiju are not a threat. It’s quite a jump.

t’s quite a different movie from the first one in that, but I think that two of our main characters like in the first one are Burn and Charlie. They are really, really – I mean, honestly, they are probably the guys I have the most fun writing along with Hannibal Chau so just from a purely selfish drive, I like writing them. I love writing for Charlie and Burn. I mean, [Burn's] in Crimson Peak for that reason, because I love working with him. You’re gonna get a lot of that, but the Kaijus are very different and you’re gonna see a very different type of the robots I think. It’s gonna be quite a different adventure.

Following on from release date announcements for the "Fifty Shades" sequels and "Fast and Furious 8" earlier, Universal Pictures has also announced a shifting around of several of its other major movies in the works - some by half a year or more.

"Warcraft," Duncan Jones' 3D film adaptation of the popular "World of Warcraft" video game franchise, has been pushed back by three months and will now open in the height of next Summer - June 10th 2016.

Universal's "The Mummy," the remake of the classic Universal Monsters film, was slated to open in the same month but has now been pushed back by a whopping nine months and will open March 24th 2017.

As a result of that delay, the second and yet unannounced film in their proposed Universal Monster Cinematic Universe has been moved back a fully year and will now open March 30th 2018.

"Mena," the re-teaming of "Edge of Tomorrow" director Doug Liman and star Tom Cruise has set up camp on January 6th 2017.

Finally, the "Pacific Rim" sequel has been moved back four months and will now open August 4th 2017.