Pacific Rim is one of those movies that—whether people ended up liking it or not—everybody in the world wanted to like it. Giant robots punching the shit out of giant monsters! Overly dramatic speeches! Idris Elba! Movies like Pacific Rim are pretty much the reason movies were invented in the first place, and now Guillermo del Toro is getting another chance to blind us all with super-awesome monster-smashing robot punches.
As del Toro revealed in a special YouTube video, he’s officially making a sequel to Pacific Rim with Travis Beacham (who wrote the original’s screenplay) and Zak Penn (who is rewriting the Ready Player One adaptation). The film will be distributed in the United States by Universal, and it’s set for release on April 7, 2017.
In case anyone is worried that del Toro will get too clever and try to do something new with it, he assures everyone that it will feature “more Kaijus, more Jaegers, kicking each other’s butts.” And, just in case you inexplicably want more than that, he also told Buzzfeed that a bunch of characters would return, including “Raleigh, Mako, Newt, Gottlieb and who knows, maybe even Hannibal Chau.” For people who don’t remember anything about Pacific Rim except the punching, Raleigh is Charlie Hunnam’s character, Mako is Rinko Kikuchi, Hannibal Chau is Ron Perlman, and the rest are people that we don’t remember either. How about that punching, though? Pretty sweet, right?
Del Toro also announced that he’s going to continue the Pacific Rim comic book and that he’s working on an animated series of some sort that will premiere before the movie, most likely to lay all of the necessary groundwork required to justify why more giant robots are fighting more giant monsters. We’re thinking it will involve a quick voiceover of someone saying “The Kaiju came back, so we’re gonna beat them up,” and then it will end.