Pacific Rim director Guillermo Del Toro has revealed the crazy reason he didn’t make Pacific Rim 2: because someone failed to make a deposit.
During an interview with Collider, the renowned filmmaker revealed he was supposed to direct Pacific Rim Uprising until production was shifted to China.
“We were getting ready to do it, it was different from the first, but it had a continuation of many of the things that I was trying to do,” he said. “Then what happened is — I mean, this is why life’s crazy, right? — they had to give a deposit for the stages at 5pm or we would lose the stages in Toronto for many months.”
The original Pacific Rim was also filmed in Toronto, but ultimately the deposit wasn’t paid. “So, I said, ‘Don’t forget we’re gonna lose the stages,' ” he said. “And five o’clock came and went, and we lost the stages.”
After the production company lost the stages in Toronto, production headed to China. Unfortunately, it would be without Guillermo Del Toro.
“They said, ‘Well, we can shoot it in China,' ” he said. “And I go, 'What do you mean we?’ [Laughs] ‘I’ve gotta go do Shape of Water.' ”
Del Toro was forced to drop out of the sequel as he was already committed to making The Shape of Water, a film that ultimately won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 2017. Meanwhile, Pacific Rim 2 was, well... pretty unremarkable.
Del Toro previously revealed some details about his version of the sequel, which would have included time-traveling Jaegers and more.
“The villain was this tech guy that had invented basically sort of the internet 2.0,” he revealed. “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,” del Toro explained. “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.”
IGN’s Pacific Rim Uprising review gave it 6.5/10 and said: “Pacific Rim Uprising is a loyal, if unremarkable, successor to the giddy original. There’s still a lot of fun to be had in the pleasure of watching Kaijus clash with Jaegers in spectacular, bone-rattling battles, and that’s reason enough to see it for a certain crowd. But beyond that, Uprising leaves a lot on the table in respects to developing this potentially interesting post-apocalyptic universe and adding more than that single note.”
Want to read more about Pacific Rim? Check out why Pacific Rim should have been Hollywood’s blockbuster blueprint as well as our look at every major Kaiju.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
