Inquiring fans of kaiju-on-mech action want to know: are we ever going to get Pacific Rim 3?
By/Aug. 2, 2019 3:52 EDT/Updated: Aug. 5, 2019 10:45 am EDT
It's far from a done deal, but there are a few promising signs indicating that — despite the middling box office of the second installment, Pacific Rim: Uprising — it's quite possible that Pacific Rim 3 may yet happen.
2013's Pacific Rim was a significant hit, thanks in part to the presence of future Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro in the director's chair. The film took place in a future where the Earth is under siege from kaiju — giant, rampaging monsters which emerge from a mysterious interdimensional portal on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. In response to the threat, humanity creates 'Jaegers,' towering robotic mechs capable of engaging the kaiju in combat. Each Jaeger is piloted by at least two people, who are mentally linked (in a process known in-universe as 'drifting') in order to share the stress of operating the hulking mechs.
The flick starred Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy) as Raleigh Beckett, an over-the-hill Jaeger pilot called out of retirement; Rinko Kikuchi (47 Ronin) as his co-pilot Mako Mori, whose parents were killed in a kaiju attack; Idris Elba (Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw) as their commanding officer Stacker Pentecost; Ron Perlman (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) as Hannibal Chau, a black market purveyor of kaiju organs; and Charlie Day (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) as Newt Geiszler, a scientist who studies the kaiju and provides intelligence on them. It ended with humanity victorious, the portal apparently destroyed when Beckett and Mori sent their Jaeger through it set to self-destruct.
2013's Pacific Rim was a significant hit, thanks in part to the presence of future Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro in the director's chair. The film took place in a future where the Earth is under.
It wasn't an ending that lent itself terribly well to a sequel, and the film underperformed stateside, barely crossing the $100 million dollar mark. But overseas, it cleaned up, grossing over three times that amount to finish with a total worldwide gross in excess of $400 million dollars — so, of course, a continuation became inevitable.
Pacific Rim: Uprising arrived in 2018, with del Toro only serving as a producer, having handed the directorial reins over to Steven DeKnight (Smallville, Marvel's Daredevil). The flick had a hurdle or two to clear with fans even before it hit screens; Hunnam was unable to reprise his role due to scheduling conflicts, and Elba and Perlman likewise sat out the sequel, which filled out its main cast with John Boyega (Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi) and Scott Eastwood (The Fate of the Furious).
The critical reception given to the film could charitably be described as 'unenthusiastic.' Observers found Uprising to be little more than a rehash of the original, one sorely missing the sure directorial hand of del Toro — and while audiences were a little kinder (the flick earned a respectable B Cinemascore), Uprising had the misfortune of opening as Black Panther was entering its sixth week. The Marvel Cinematic Universe film, which would become the highest-grossing superhero film of all time in North America until being dethroned by Avengers: Endgame, had held the #1 spot at the box office in each of its first five weeks of release — and while Uprising managed to snag the top spot in its debut frame, it did so with an underwhelming take of $28 million dollars.
The flick eventually managed to garner $290 million dollars worldwide, but with a production budget of $150 million dollars, this could hardly be called a rousing success. Unlike its predecessor, though, Uprising actually teased a sequel, as its ending implied that humanity was ready to take the fight through the portal to the homeworld of the 'precursors,' the aliens who created the kaiju for the purpose of preparing Earth for colonization.
This, of course, is our first indication that Pacific Rim 3 is a possibility. Also helping matters: the Pacific Rim movies play like gangbusters in China, an increasingly important market for big-budget Hollywood fare. While Uprising failed to reach $60 million dollars in domestic box office receipts, it came just a hair short of the $100 million dollar mark in China — meaning that, at the very least, Pacific Rim 3 could count on a strong boost to its international take from that market.
It should also be mentioned that the property is being kept in the public eye, thanks to Netflix. The streamer has commissioned two full seasons of an anime-style Pacific Rim animated series, the first of which will be hitting the small screen sometime in 2020. If viewers take to the series, it could very well bring the subject of a potential Pacific Rim 3 into the thick of the conversation at Universal, the studio behind Uprising.
Finally, we should take into consideration the comments made by DeKnight in 2018. The director indicated that not only does he have some pretty firm ideas about a story for Pacific Rim 3, but he hinted that he'd be interested in bringing back the stars of the first film for another go-round.
'When we were doing Pacific Rim: Uprising, I was taking a lot of notes on what we would do for the third movie, if we had a third movie, and if I was involved I'd pass along a lot of those ideas during that time to the good people at Legendary,' the director told ScreenRant. 'But whether or not there's a third movie is completely above my paygrade. I haven't heard anything. My own schedule is getting a little complicated, so even if there is [a third movie] I'm not sure I'd have the bandwidth to be involved. But yeah, there was a very clear idea for what [Pacific Rim 3 would be]. Without giving too much away, I can say getting the band back together was a very large part of it.'
So, will we ever get to see Pacific Rim 3? It may depend on the Netflix series' reception, and on whether the members of 'the band' — which we're assuming includes Hunnam, Elba, and Perlman — have any interest in reuniting. We feel comfortable filing it under 'P' for 'Probably, at some point.'
This post contains major spoilers from Pacific Rim Uprising.Another war is brewing in. At least that’s what Uprising, the sequel out now in theaters, wants you to think. Like DC, and all the other big-name properties working to capitalize on expanded universe opportunities, this follow-up unspools with the kind of chameleonic gaze that has one eye looking in the present while the other looks to the future. Plans for a threequel - and beyond - go back to the beginning of the saga, when told three years ago that 'we have decided that we're going to shoot ambitiously and say, 'Let's hope we have three movies.' 'Del Toro wouldn't stick with the franchise, but while developing Uprising, the series' new gatekeeper, writer-director Steven S.
DeKnight (Netflix's Daredevil) started sketching what's to come. 'My idea was always to end the third movie by expanding the universe into a Star Wars-/ Star Trek-style universe, where you could have standalones or you could follow the canon,' he Den of Geek recently. 'Just make it big and fun.' In that regard, Uprising serves its purpose as a mostly anodyne bridge between the franchise's first and inevitable third movies. A quick refresher: The first installment, directed by Del Toro, introduced viewers to the world of kaiju (Godzilla-like monsters) and jaegers (Gundam-like robots). An interdimensional portal at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, dubbed 'the breach,' was letting these kaiju mercilessly terrorize coastal cities, and so Idris Elba, starring as General Stacker Pentecost, led a team of pilots to victory in an epic underwater showdown that became known, fittingly, as the Battle of the Breach.Uprising, directed by DeKnight and co-written with Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, and T.S.
Nowlin, picks up 10 years after that battle, with the world enjoying some semblance of peace. John Boyega gives a tremendous turn as Jake Pentecost, Stacker's son, who, in the absence of his late war-hero father, lives like a fusion of Rey and BoJack Horseman, a hard-partying rebel scavenging junk jaeger parts for profit. It's not long before he finds trouble alongside Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny), a jaeger fangirl who's toyed with building her own bot, getting arrested and shipped off to the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps to instruct new recruits alongside his old co-pilot Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood). It's there that Jake learns of a new jaeger program, one that combines cloned kaiju cells leftover from the war with the mecha-tech to create massive remote-controlled drones.Why?
Everyone's a little unsure, honestly. Where Del Toro worked to mesh themes of humanity with ambitious set pieces in the first movie, DeKnight's sequel drags like a long string of plotty excuses made to get these bots back out of the garage and battling extraterrestrial baddies. Which is fine, the movie just lumbers to get us to that point, with not enough real tension and drawn-out focus on a rogue jaeger.Things start to get interesting later, when Uprising reveals that Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day, back from the first) has been connecting to kaiju brains in secret, lured back to the Drift almost as a junkie. So while the aliens have been shut out of the human dimension, they still have a link to earth and a vehicle with which to sow mayhem. That's exactly what happens when the drone program is given the green light and the new-fangled bots turn on their human controllers, attacking the jaeger bases and briefly re-opening the breach. Out of the rift crawl three kaiju, who aim to claim Mount Fuji to terraform the planet and set the stage for their alien masterminds, the Precursors, to colonize.
While DeKnight and company struggle to match the heart of Del Toro's original - there's a lesson about teamwork and redemption for Boyega and Spaeny in here somewhere - they make sure to capitalize on what's most fun about this franchise at least once: massive robots fighting massive monsters.In Tokyo, Uprising ditches the doom and gloom of the first movie to stage a showdown that's sunny and epic, giving viewers flashbacks to the times they might have spent sitting in front of the TV cheering on Megazord. The kaiju combine into a mega-kaiju. The jaegers assemble. The battle you've been waiting for plays out as a rollicking, occasionally dizzying display (see this in IMAX!) of crumbling skyscrapers, swinging fists, and gnashing teeth. It's a true spectacle and achievement.Though DeKnight tries to paint a picture of mankind teetering on the edge, what has to happen is a bit predictable. Yes, there's a casualty, but the humans ultimately delay the apocalypse, so the action satisfies while leaving room for more.
After the mega-kaiju falls, cut to ribbons by a jaeger-turned-rocket, we get an essential coda with Geiszler strapped in an interrogation chair. 'We're gonna keep coming,' he tells Jake, referring to the Precursors.
'Your luck is going to run out.' He's menacing for a split second - as much as Day can be - before Jake says, 'We're gonna come for them!' Translation: That's what that third movie, Del Toro and DeKnight mentioned, will look like. A pre-emptive strike, and, likely, a full-on war.
Despite the shot we're left with, it's clear Geiszler isn't the one to fear. He's a villain as much as any mild-mannered person possessed by demons in an exorcism movie is. Tactfully, DeKnight and company have kept the real antagonists, the Precursors, out of sight this round. If audiences rally around this movie, voting with their feet to justify more, expect the otherworldly puppet masters to get their share of the spotlight next.Boyega, who also produced Uprising and wants to produce a third, confirmed as much to IGN, 'We'll probably have to go to their world this time.'
With new help, to boot. 'Jaegers won't be able to go through the breach the way we want them to,' he added. 'Maybe we'll try and build something else.'