'Pacific Rim' Animated Series Will Bridge Gap Between Films

The news of a Pacific Rim sequel came with good and bad details. That it's happening at all is the biggest bit of good news. Guillermo del Toro's film wasn't a massive hit in the United States but did well enough internationally to warrant a sequel. The downside is that fans will have to wait about three years to see the film. Pacific Rim 2 is scheduled for release April 7, 2017.

In the meantime we'll get two other del Toro movies as well as a nice, sizable appetizer in the Pacific Rim world. A Pacific Rim animated series is in the works. In a new interview, the producer/writer/director explained what the animated series might entail. He exampled how the story would be told and where it might air. Development is still in very early days, but the idea is to bridge the gap between the first and second movie in serialized form. The show is currently being shopped around. Read more about the Pacific Rim animated series below.

Del Toro spoke to Collider in depth about the series. First up, the premise and time frame:

It's a great set-up and a link between the first movie and the second movie.  It really enhances the mythology of the characters; we have cameos of characters from the first movie, but mostly it's a new set of characters.  New jaegers, except for one or two, [and] new kaijus.  It's really fun.

The show will also be one long story, rather than a string of self-contained episodes.

We're going for a long arc, so the idea is to show a group of characters—we have pilots, functional jaegers, but we have all these younger characters.  I really want to explore things that are complimentary to the things that I want to explore in the second movie: drift, what drifting does to you, what is needed to drift, a lot of stuff that I think is important, but also the jaeger technology, the kaijus being evolved, ideas about the precursors—the guys that control the kaijus.  We have a lot of leeway in 13 episodes and I wanna make it sort of in the same spirit of Pacific Rim, which is the ideal audience for Pacific Rim was young—very young, 11-year-olds and so forth—but with really beautiful design and stories that make these characters interesting in a way that I found them interesting in, for example, Year Zero, the graphic novel that we did.  And I think that's the basic thrust of the thing.

As for when and where we might see the show, they're currently talking to potential showrunners and writers and hope to shop the show around once the full package is put together:

Legendary is talking to a few outlets so I'd rather not disclose myself.  The way we set up The Strain was to talk to everyone, literally, on the map, and then find who's response we sort of jibe with the most.  I think in this series, it would be great to find a place that can give it a proper presentation and can advertise the creation of the series.  So we're open to being pleasantly surprised everywhere.

You can read more from del Toro at Collider's link.

I think the idea of making the series link to the movie is smart, as the film will be out of most people's mind by the time it hits theaters in 2017. Plus, it'll help start a new conflict as the first one was pretty definitely wrapped up in the first film.