Last week it was announced that Legendary Pictures would be teaming with Universal to produce Pacific Rim 2 for an April 7, 2017 release. While that date is nearly three years away, filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro is making the rounds talking about The Strain television series adaptation and has revealed some details about the big monster big mech sequel. Learn some of the new Pacific Rim 2 details after the jump.

Pacific Rim 2 Details Revealed

Speaking with the Wall Street Journal, Del Toro revealed the following:

Screenwriter Zak Penn and I really went in, we started with screenwriter Travis Beacham about a year and a half ago, kicking ideas back and forth. And, admittedly, I said to Zak, let’s keep kicking ideas till we find one that really, really turns the first movie on its ear, so to speak. (…) It was hard to create a world that did not come from a comic book, that had its own mythology, so we had to sacrifice many aspects to be able to cram everything in the first movie. Namely, for example “the Drift”, which was an interesting concept. [Then there was] this portal that ripped a hole into the fabric of our universe, what were the tools they were using? And we came up with a really, really interesting idea. I don’t want to spoil it, but I think at the end of the second movie, people will find out that the two movies stand on their own. They’re very different from each other, although hopefully bringing the same joyful giant spectacle. But the tenor of the two movies will be quite different.

Interesting. So what we’ve learned here is that:

The tenor of the films are very different from each other

The plot may have something to do with the tools the alternate dimension beings were using to rip a hole creating a portal in our universe.

And it seems he’s hinting that the plot will delve deeper into “The Drift” aspect of the Jaeger pilots — I remember reading a whole subplot around this in the script for the original that didn’t make the finished film

And it seems like the end of the second movie serves up a nice twist or reveal in motives/information

All of this certainly excites me, and if Del Toro can somehow convince a studio to give him hundreds of millions of dollars to further explore the weird alien alternate dimension, thats fantastic. There are a few more things Del Toro reveals in the interview:

He begins designing in six weeks for the second film, which will feature “some new jaegers and a lot of new kaiju.”

A few new characters will join the survivors from the first adventure — his plan is to make it “multicultural and humanistic as much as possible, to make characters from many nationalities or gender, to make them equal in the scope of the adventure, in the day-to-day of the adventure.”

The Mexican filmmaker also laughed off a suggestion that Lovecraft’s Cthulhu could make an appearance in the sequel, insisting that his canceled project At Mountains of Madness is now a real “strong possibility” now that Legendary is working with Universal.

I’ll believe Madness is happening when I see it announced, but my hopes are still firmly checked. Del Toro also revealed some more info on the announced Pacific Rim animated series:

They are talking to a bunch of networks.

The series will be set prior to the first film and will tell the stories that happened to pilots working in the Shatterdome, but also the cadet recruits who are learning how to become pilots.

Some of the new characters will appear in Pacific Rim 2.

Hopes to have one year of the animation aired by the time Pacific Rim 2 comes out in April 2017.

So it sounds between this and three years of comics/graphic novels set inside the Pacific Rim universe, fans will have a lot of backstory and learn more mythology about the world. You can read the whole interview now at WSJ.com.