Guillermo del Toro didn't direct Pacific Rim: Uprising because of a clerical error
The Pan's Labyrinth director hasn't even watched the sequel to his 2013 blockbuster
Hollywood isn’t all glitz and glam. It’s a business, staffed by human beings who sometimes forget to cross their t’s and dot their i’s. Those mistakes can be catastrophic, like neglecting to pay your actors and writers a living wage, or they can be relatively small things that spin out into very, very large things, like when a staffer missed a payment for a Toronto soundstage and ended up sinking an entire franchise.
In a recent interview with Collider to celebrate Pacific Rim’s ten-year anniversary, Guillermo del Toro revealed the pretty silly reason he stepped away from directing the film’s 2018 sequel.
“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. Then what happened is—I mean, this is why life’s crazy, right?—they had to give a deposit for the stages at 5 pm or we would lose the stages in Toronto for many months,” he shared. “So, I said, ‘Don’t forget we’re gonna lose the stages,’ and five o’clock came and went, and we lost the stages. They said, ‘Well, we can shoot it in China.’ And I go, ‘What do you mean, we? I’ve gotta go do Shape of Water.’”
While The Shape Of Water, a film about a human falling in love with a monster, went on to net del Toro an Oscar for Best Picture, Pacific Rim: Uprising—a pretty empty, Steven S. DeKnight-directed sequel about robots fighting monsters—pulled only middling reviews and disappointed at the box office. Netflix tried its hand at an anime extension, titled Pacific Rim: The Black in 2021, but the universe has been quiet ever since.
But while del Toro clearly won this proverbial breakup, the hurt is still fresh. “I didn’t see the final movie because that’s like watching home movies from your ex-wife,” he said. “It is terrible if they’re good and worse if they’re bad, or the opposite. You don’t wanna know.” With a total pivot to animation in his near future, it seems like Del Toro has successfully averted his eyes.