At its heart, 2013‘s Pacific Rim was always a love letter to Japanese mecha and monster stories. Del Toro has previous gone on the record to explain how he wanted to recapture the thrill he had as a kid watching flicks like Godzilla and the film definitely held tight to that aesthetic. The Gipsy Danger and crew scooped up a cool $411 million dollars at the box office and a legion of action figures and merchandise bloated earnings even further, so it wasn’t much of a surprise to hear news of a sequel officially going underway.
It would have been easy for the epic battles between the monstrous kaiju and the Jaegers to steal the scenes, but a large part of the appeal for the first film wasn’t just the spectacular visual effects, but the dynamic and provoking relationships between the Jaeger pilots.
Charlie Hunnam, who plays Raleigh Becket, sat down with EW to explain the struggle with balancing that very concern, "When it becomes more important than storytelling, I get very nervous, and you sort of lose me a little bit. Although we tried very hard on Pacific Rim to marry those two elements, I do feel like ultimately it got weighed heavier on the side of spectacle than storytelling… I do feel like we could have maybe plumbed the depths of the character and the storytelling a little bit more.”
The team will get another crack at juggling narration and spectacle soon as Pacific Rim 2 is rumored to begin filming this fall. While it would have been great to see del Toro take on Constantine with Justice League Dark, we’ll gladly accept insane monsters and badass robots in its stead.
