Today in giant fighting robots: Guillermo del Toro has provided additional information about his forthcoming Pacific Rim cartoon show. The director first revealed he was developing a Pacific Rim television series in the same YouTube video where he confirmed he was making a sequel to the movie—so the announcement may have slipped past fans who were just happy to hear that massive monsters and giant robots would continue battling each other, well into the foreseeable future. Now, del Toro has revealed some specifics on the show in an interview with Collider.
“We’re going for a long arc, so the idea is to show a group of characters—we have pilots, functional Jaegers, but we have all these younger characters. I really want to explore things that are complimentary to the things that I want to explore in the second movie: drift, what drifting does to you, what is needed to drift, a lot of stuff that I think is important, but also the Jaeger technology, the kaijus being evolved, ideas about the precursors—the guys that control the kaijus.”
The series, which del Toro hopes will run for an initial 13 episode engagement, will bridge the gap between the first and second movies. Characters from the first movie will pop by for cameos, but the show will focus mainly on a new, younger cast. The series is also being targeted at younger viewers (“11-year-olds and so forth,” according to del Toro), since there’s no fighting robot toy line so successful that it can’t benefit from being featured on an animated show for kids.
Del Toro hasn’t found a home for the series yet, but he and Legendary Pictures are currently shopping it around. Pacific Rim 2 is slated for release on April 17, 2017, so look for this show to start filling that gap with giant metal fists of fury sometime before then.