While promoting his new film Nightmare Alley, director Guillermo Del Toro has taken a moment to look back on one of his previous projects, Pacific Rim. Though the director had a vision for a sequel to the cult hit, and at one point was working on a screenplay, he eventually had to step back from the project due to changes within the production company. Now, he’s revealed what a GDT-led Pacific Rim sequel may have looked like.
“The villain was this tech guy that had invented basically sort of the internet 2.0,” Del Toro explained in an interview with The Wrap. “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.”
For those who don’t quite remember the events of the original film, the Precursors are an alien-esque race who are revealed to be controlling the Earth-invading kaiju from within an alternate dimension. Del Toro’s sequel may have made the creepy alien race even weirder, however.
“And then we found out that the Precursors are us thousands of years in the future,” he continued. “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. It was really crazy. And some elements of that they took and they re-jigged.”
For those who’ve seen the sequel that we did get instead, Pacific Rim: Uprising, some elements of this may seem familiar. The sequel focused on technology developed by a somewhat suspicious tech corporation, while one of the main plot points for the film involves scientist Newt Geiszler being mind-controlled by the Precursors. The reveal that the Precursors were actually future humans didn’t make it into the final film, however.
One of the biggest changes to GDT’s vision, however, would have been the role that Mako Mori played in the film. Many fans weren’t happy with the story arc Mori was given in Uprising, where she was unceremoniously killed off fairly early in the film.
“To me, the hero was Mako Mori,” Del Toro said of his vision for the sequel. “I wanted her not only to live, I wanted her to be one of the main characters in the second movie.”
