Guillermo del Toro explains the plot of his scrapped Pacific Rim sequel

Guillermo del Toro is finally sharing his vision for that Pacific Rim sequel. Del Toro directed and co-wrote the original 2013 film, which is all about humans in the near-future who use giant robots called Jaegers to fight sea monsters called Kaiju in the Pacific Ocean. The Oscar winner was originally attached to write the sequel as well. Eventually, he departed the project, and the ultimate sequel, 2018's Pacific Rim: Uprising, strayed heavily from his original concept.

Del Toro explained his ideas for the sequel in an interview with The Wrap. He said, “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.”

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,” he said of his idea. “And some elements of that they took and they re-jigged.”

Another big difference between del Toro’s imagined sequel and the actual sequel is the fate of Mako Mori. In Pacific Rim: Uprising, she has a minor role and dies off-screen.

“To me, the hero was Mako Mori. I wanted her not only to live, I wanted her to be one of the main characters in the second movie,” del Toro said.

Pacific Rim: Uprising was ultimately a critical and commercial flop, but the universe still continues with Netflix’s anime series Pacific Rim: The Black, which released its first season earlier this year, with a second season currently in production. That series has a grittier tone than the earlier films.