If you were holding out hope for Pacific Rim 2, we’ve got some bad news for you today. The Hollywood Reporter ran a piece about the current testy relationship between Legendary Pictures and Universal, and one of the casualties was Pacific Rim 2.
The first Pacific Rim had a $190 million budget and made $411 million at the box office. While the movie performed well in China, Universal has decided to back off on the sequel since it’s ROI isn’t a sure thing. According to THR, Pacific Rim 2 will not come out in August 2017, and may not get made at all.
You might recall Matt’s review of Pacific Rim a few years ago, noting that the action was lots of fun but the characters were paper thin. I definitely agree with him about the characters, particularly Charlie Hunnam in the lead, whose character was named… umm… Guy-Dude Heroson or something. (Who remembers his name, seriously?) Mako (Rinko Kikuchi) should have been the lead, but she was squandered as a second banana stuck on the passenger side of the drift. Honestly, I was really disappointed by the general blandness of the film. It seemed so rudimentary, and even the jaeger/kaiju fights felt repetitive.
Still, I wouldn’t have minded a second Pacific Rim. As long as it was about Mako, and Whitebread Blandguy wasn’t in the movie.
Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak was also a player in this studio drama. Legendary and Universal were to have split the cost of production as long as the movie was rated PG-13 rather than rated R. Crimson Peak will be rated R, which led Universal to backout on cost splitting, leaving Legendary with the entire bill.
How do you feel about the indefinite delay of Pacific Rim 2? And without looking it up, can you remember what Charlie Hunnam’s character name was? There’s a comments section–use it.
[THR via IndieWire]
