Guillermo del Toro Writing Pacific Rim 2 With Zak Penn
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- June 10, 2014
By Danny F. Santos (doddleNEWS)
Remember that giant monster movie that seemed to kick-off a resurgance of giant monster movies? That’s right, there’s news on Pacific Rim 2! While promoting The Strain, Guillermo del Toro opened up recently?about the writing of a successor to the original film saying:
I'm working very, very hard with Zak Penn. We've been working for a few months now in secret. We found a way to twist it around. Travis Beacham was involved in the storyline and now I'm writing with Zak because Travis has become a TV mogul. – GDT on Buzzfeed
Beacham, of course, has moved onto his new series Hieroglyph for Fox. Zak Penn is a new name associated with writing Pacific Rim 2. He’s already written screenplays for X-Men: The Last Stand and The Incredible Hulk as well as a story credit for Marvel’s The Avengers.
The first film did ok at the domestic box office, but cleaned up overseas, but it was not good enough for Legendary and Warner Bros. to immediately greenlight for a sequel, just the development. So although the two of them are writing the screenplay, the sequel hasn’t been greenlit at all — or as del Toro puts it:
I don't have the money, but I'm proceeding like it is happening.
What makes del Toro optimistic probably has more to do with his very good relationship with Legendary Pictures CEO Thomas Tull, who just this past March spoke a bit about the possibility of a sequel:
We love being in business with Guillermo, and frankly that movie, if you look it up, did I think more business than the first X-Men, did more than Batman Begins, our first movie, did more than Superman Returns, The Fast and the Furious, Star Trek so for a movie that was an original property that we made up, it's done really well. It did north of 400 million dollars globally and both the home video sales and the merchandise have way over-indexed, so it seems like fans really loved the world. So we're going to sit down with Guillermo, and as long as we think it's authentic and there's something to say, we're certainly open to it.
As for what the plot of Pacific Rim 2?would be, del Toro isn’t saying much. What he has said, though, is that we’re definitely not getting a prequel (thank goodness).
Some people were wondering if we were going to do the prequel. I was never interested in doing that first wave of invasion. I'm going for very new, very crazy ideas on the second one, which are very different from the first one but you will get really great spectacle.
The only hurdle I see in the way is that Legendary will need to get the go-ahead from Warner Bros. on Pacific Rim 2, based on their former deal. Since splitting with them, and making a 5-year deal with Universal, Legendary has been hard at work on genre projects with them. However, any sequels they make for any films from the Warner Bros. era will need to be made with Warner Bros., including Godzilla 2.
In the meantime, you can catch Guillermo del Toro’s new television series The Strain premiering July 13, 2014, on FX and his next film Crimson Peak will debut on October 16, 2015.
The post Guillermo del Toro Writing Pacific Rim 2 With Zak Penn appeared first on Doddle.
