Giant Freakin Robot

Even though it was something of a box office dud in the States, we loved Pacific Rim here at GFR. Giant mechs tussling with giant monsters — what’s not to like? But even if you were lukewarm on the film itself, the design work was stellar, and perfectly suited to expanding your toy collection. So far we’ve seen some awesome Pacific Rim toys, but if you’re a fan who’s been stocking a toy shelf with NECA’s amazing toy recreations of the film’s Jaegers, crack open that wallet because more are on the way in the new year. Check out NECA’s new visual guide to their Pacific Rim toy line below. You can click the image for a larger version.

Guillermo del Toro’s giant robots versus mega monsters sequel Pacific Rim 2 won’t hit theaters for a few more years, but that doesn’t mean we’re not hungry for details, though they do seem rather unimportant in the grand scheme of things. As long as massive mechs battle nasty creatures with the enthusiasm of a small child loudly smashing toys together on a playground, we’re 100% on board. The landscape of the second film will reportedly be quite different, though some key pieces will remain in play.

Talking to Collider while hyping up the impending Blu-ray release of The Strain, del Toro delivered a brief glimpse at what the world of Pacific Rim 2 will look like. In the wake of the first film, it’s a much more peaceful place, as after they closed the rift at the bottom of the ocean, the world’s giant monster problem went away. But then you have all of these skyscraper tall mechs to deal with, and what do you do with them?

We’re a long way off from Pacific Rim 2, like damn near three years away, but that’s not going to stop us from getting excited about the prospect of Guillermo del Toro throwing more giant monsters and more giant robots (don’t worry, we know they’re not really robots, but for the sake of convenience, we refer to them as such with regularity). We’re apparently not the only ones pumped up for this, as there is now a new poster for the sequel that the movie released via its Facebook page. And as if that’s not enough, del Toro has talked about possible start dates for production, as well as future installments beyond just one sequel.

Guillermo del Toro had a lot to talk about at Comic-Con this year. He’s returning to his horror roots with the upcoming Crimson Peak. He’s got The Strain trying to make vampires genuinely scary again on FX. And he’s still riding high on the triumphant announcement that Pacific Rim 2 is coming in 2017, which has got to feel great in light of all the people who shit on it when it under-performed at the domestic box office. And while he’s keeping Pacific Rim 2’s overall story under wraps, he did reveal a few hints about what’s in store for us during a new interview with Hero Complex.

Del Toro has said before that Pacific Rim 2 will raise the stakes and up the action of the original, but given how things wrapped up at the end of the first movie, it will be interesting to see how he continues from there. On a basic level, he says he’ll be mixing things up just so it doesn’t feel like he’s repeating the same sort of action beats we saw last time around. But he also says they’ll be exploring more of the mythology about the so-called “Anteverse,” the alternate universe that was lobbing monsters at our world through a dimensional rift at the bottom of the Pacific. So could that mean an expedition into the Anteverse for our heroes? If so, will that mean mankind figuring out how to create a rift of their own, or will the denizens of the Anteverse open up another one themselves, hoping to get some payback?

Oculus Rift sounds just like something that comes straight out of science fiction. Head-mounted virtual reality devices have played huge roles in genre movies since the very concept of virtual reality became an idea the public was aware of. Now it’s looking more and more like this particular piece of high-tech wizardry could play a big part in the future of a sequel we’re looking forward to, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim 2.

There may not be another Pacific Rim movie coming out until 2017, but this property is tailor-made for the crowd and San Diego Comic-Con, so Legendary has gone ahead and booked some space on the crowded floor just for the hell of it. We’re not there, but our bigger, fancier sibling Cinema Blend is all over this epic gathering and has a report on these two things are coming together.

Guillermo del Toro got to share some exciting news last month with the announcement that Pacific Rim 2 was officially happening, and even had a release date set for April 7, 2017. This Sunday he begins haunting the small screen with his new vampire horror series The Strain on FX. Anybody who follows del Toro’s work knows that the dude has at least two dozen different irons in the fire at any given time, but a new interview with the Wall Street Journal provides a few more details about the Pacific Rim animated series and one of del Toro’s longest-gestating projects, an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.

The initial announcement about Pacific Rim 2 included only a brief mention of the Pacific Rim animated series, but thankfully the Wall Street Journal folks pried a few more details out of him. The ‘toon will follow the adventures of Jaeger pilots and cadets battling the kaiju in the years before the events of Pacific Rim. The animated series will also delve into the backstory of characters we will eventually meet in Pacific Rim 2.

Here’s what del Toro told Collider:

We are right now in the middle of talking and negotiating with a few Japanese companies for the animation. We are talking to a couple of showrunners that have a strong animation background, [we’re] casting the writers room. What’s great is it’s a great set-up and a link between the first movie and the second movie. It really enhances the mythology of the characters; we have cameos of characters from the first movie, but mostly it’s a new set of characters. New jaegers, except for one or two, [and] new kaijus. It’s really fun…

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. We have a lot of leeway in 13 episodes and I wanna make it sort of in the same spirit of Pacific Rim, which is the ideal audience for Pacific Rim was young — very young, 11-year-olds and so forth — but with really beautiful design and stories that make these characters interesting in a way that I found them interesting in, for example, Year Zero, the graphic novel that we did. And I think that’s the basic thrust of the thing.

Pacific Rim stories will also continue in comic form, following up on the Tales from Year Zero comic.