What Would’ve Happened in Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim Sequel?

In 2018, we got Pacific Rim: Uprising, the sequel to writer/director Guillermo del Toro‘s 2013 blockbuster Pacific Rim (now streaming on SYFY), but we got it with a lot of personnel changes. Del Toro was still a producer on the film, but he’d stepped away from writing and directing, leaving Steven S. DeKnight to helm the film, which feature new stars John Boyega and Cailee Spaeny. 

But that wasn’t always the plan. Originally, it was del Toro who planned to take on a follow-up to the film himself, and together with writer Zak Penn, he’d dreamed up a plot that was very, very different from the one we eventually got.

What would have happened in Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim 2?

Pacific Rim follows an Earth that’s under siege from massive monsters known as Kaiju, who emerge out of a rift at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean at regular intervals to attack coastal cities. To combat this, the world has united to form a core of “Jaegers,” giant mechs piloted by a pair of fighters who connect via a neurological “Drift” that allows them to share the neurological load of operating the machinery. By the end of the film, scientists have discovered that the Kaiju are controlled by alien beings known as “Precursors,” who are using the monsters to wipe out the population of the Earth so they can strip it for resources, then move on to the next planet. 

By the end of the film, humanity has defeated the Kaiju and seemingly closed the rift for good. Pacific Rim: Uprising picks up the action years later, when a rogue scientist whose brain has fused with a preserved Kaiju brain helps the Kaiju to return, even creating Jaeger/Kaiju hybrids along the way. It’s a fun twist on the original, but it’s not what del Toro had planned.

Speaking with The Wrap back in 2021, del Toro explained that his idea for Pacific Rim 2 would’ve featured very twisty new reveals about the identity of the Precursors, which would’ve led to a kind of battle across time.

“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,” 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.”

So, while the Kaiju would have obviously been an essential part of the action, the real story of Pacific Rim 2 would have been essentially a battle between the humanity of the present and the humanity of the future. It also would have been a film much more centered on the fan-favorite character Mako Mori, played by Rinko Kikuchi, who was killed off fairly early in Uprising. 

So, why didn’t del Toro get to make his version? Basically, Legendary Pictures switched studios from Warner Bros. to Universal, and due to a last-minute issue with booking soundstages, production had to be pushed back so del Toro could make The Shape of Water. That meant other filmmakers came in, and del Toro was ultimately on the sidelines.

Pacific Rim is now streaming on SYFY.