About a month ago Guillermo del Toro told Haleigh that he’s going in a very different direction with Pacific Rim 2. Some favorite characters from the first film will return, but others won’t because del Toro is hoping to use them at the end of Pacific Rim 2 in an effort to ramp things up for a third film.

Who are the lucky ones to make it into Pac Rim 2? We’ve got two names for you – Charlie Day and Burn Gorman. While talking to del Toro about the upcoming DVD and Blu-ray release of The Strain season 1, he told me that Day’s Geiszler and Gorman’s Gottlieb will return for the second film which picks up a few years after the events of the first. Hit the jump for more.

First off, here’s what del Toro had to say about the Pacific Rim 2 timeline:

“It’s a few years after the first one. It’s not an immediate follow-up. It is the world having been freed of Kaiju, what happens to the world after – what happens to the Jaeger technology once the Kaiju are not a threat. It’s quite a jump.”

Here’s what del Toro said when asked about Day and Gorman and if we’ll get more science in the second film:

“Yes. It’s quite a different movie from the first one in that, but I think that two of our main characters like in the first one are Burn and Charlie. They are really, really – I mean, honestly, they are probably the guys I have the most fun writing along with Hannibal Chau so just from a purely selfish drive, I like writing them. I love writing for Charlie and Burn. I mean, [Burn’s] in Crimson Peak for that reason, because I love working with him. You’re gonna get a lot of that, but the Kaijus are very different and you’re gonna see a very different type of the robots I think. It’s gonna be quite a different adventure.”

Beginning the movie in a Kaiju-free world seems like a very promising starting point, especially as far as the main characters are concerned. If Kaiju are no longer a threat, will that change the nature of Geiszler and Gottlieb’s work? And what happens to Jaeger pilots like Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako (Rinko Kikuchi)? Are they out of work entirely?

Del Toro has mentioned that there will be a lot of new Kaiju in Pacific Rim 2, so clearly the world will need Jaegers again at some point, but the idea of seeing the population transition from a period of post-Kaiju peacefulness to another ambush has loads of potential.