Guillermo del Toro’s Involvement in Pacific Rim Uprising Revealed

Even before Guillermo del Toro‘s 2013 film Pacific Rim hit theaters, the director was already talking about what would come next for the Monsters vs. Robots franchise.

By the time Pacific Rim Uprising arrives next year, however, it will be after hitting many snags along the way. The project was put on indefinite hold at one point, lost its star at another, and when it finally went in to production didn’t even have del Toro sitting in the director’s chair. Given his extensive involvement in shepherding the franchise from words on a page to a movie on a screen and toys on a shelf, del Toro remains heavily involved in the film.

ComingSoon.net visited the Sydney, Australia production of the sequel earlier this year where Guillermo’s involvement in the project was officially clarified, and fans will likely be pleased.

“He’s been involved from the different ideas, weighing in, the different drafts,” producer Cale Boyter says. “We send him all the visuals and everything. He loves Boyega. Obviously all the stuff he looked at he’s touched and noted. He hasn’t been here yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point he ends up here. Moves things around and I’ll be like ‘No, go back over there.’”

Speaking of the different drafts, director Steven S. DeKnight, who fans know from the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spartacus, and Marvel’s Daredevil, became the man behind the camera for the sequel and he walked us through the extensive development process on the movie.

“When I came on there were three other drafts of the script that were developed through the years,” DeKnight revealed. “I read them and there were great elements of each one, so I cherry-picked the best parts of three scripts, which was fantastic to have that opportunity.”

DeKnight went on to say that after picking the moments he liked the best, he worked within a writer’s room to crack the script wherein he teamed up with screenwriters Emily Carmichael and Kira Snyder to write the full outline for the movie.

“Then I sent Kira and Emily off to write the script because we only had like three weeks to write it at that point, and as they were writing, I was rewriting, and then we had a draft of the script at that point. Then, if I remember the story correctly, I turned it in, Legendary loves it, and literally 24 hours later, Charlie Hunnam announces he was doing the ‘Papillon’ remake and wasn’t available, so we had a bit of a scramble to reconceive the idea.”

After that, The Maze Runner screenwriter T.S. Nowlin landed on the scene to help out with their script that now needed to excise a major character.

DeKnight adds: “We wanted to keep the story we had, just take Charlie Hunnam out of it and realign it. So we did some amazing work and I started polishing it up and here we are.”

Pacific Rim Uprising will land in theaters on March 23, 2018.