PACIFIC RIM 2: MAELSTROM(?) Begins Filming This Year!


Pacific Rim Movie

Pacific Rim was a movie that had quite a split reaction. Many asserted that the plot and characters were thin and regarded the movie as terrible, but others love it for the pure fun factor of giant robots fighting giant monsters and the fact that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. I fall in the latter camp – and I didn’t think the script was that bad. It was good enough and the characters were fun, but Charlie Hunnam wasn’t exactly the most inspiring lead. It was just so incredibly enjoyable and colourful and you can tell that everybody had a real blast making it; it’s the type of movie you can watch when you’re feeling down and it’s guaranteed to put a smile on your face. It also marked a change from movies like Transformers that take themselves incredibly seriously, as this relished in the fact that it was fucking stupid.

That being said, I’m not sure if a sequel is necessary. I enjoy monster movies but the premise tends to get stale after a while. The solution for that is just focus on telling stories about interesting characters against the backdrop of monsters but even that can get stale after a while. It really was a one-and-done-type movie with everything resolved at the end, but Guillermo del Toro insists that there’s a larger world than what we’ve seen and Legendary have committed to a sequel and an animated series, so I gues there’s still a lot more material left.

Canada’s Global News (via Birth.Movies.Death) is saying that the movie will be shooting this November at Pinewood Studios in Toronto under the title ‘Maelstrom,’ although whether that’s just a cover title for filming or the actual title remains to be seen. Pacific Rim: Maelstrom does sound pretty fucking awesome though.

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Can this news source be trusted? Eh, we’ll run with it – stranger things have happened.

This is certainly a financial risk as the first movie only made $411m worldwide (mostly from overseas markets) on a budget of almost $200m, meaning the film was likely barely profitable. We know that there is a market for properties like this (Transformers and Godzilla say hi) so why did it gross so little domestically? Some people claim it’s because the film wasn’t good, others say it didn’t connect with audiences, but I think it was down to marketing. It was, for some bizarre reason, not really marketed to kids at all; instead the jaeger and kaiju toys were directed towards older nerds. A ridiculous decision from the Warner Bros. marketing team – who are usually quite good – and I’m pretty firm in saying that if kids everywhere had and/or wanted to play with toys from the film then the film would have been a much bigger success, but merchandise barely existed. Hopefully this is rectified with the sequel.

Whatever it ends up being called, Pacific Rim 2 is out August 7th 2017 – I think I’m gonna go watch the first movie now.