A $180 million blockbuster about giant robots fighting giant monsters hailing from the mind of one of cinema’s most noted and acclaimed purveyors of the fantastical sounds like a license to print money, but Pacific Rim only avoided box office disaster thanks to a strong performance in China, which contributed over 25 percent of the movie’s total $411 million take.
Nonetheless, the profit margins were apparently strong enough for a sequel to get the green light, with the notable caveat of Guillermo del Toro vacating the director’s chair in favor of Steven S. DeKnight stepping in, while Warner Bros. handed the distribution rights over to Universal.
As it turns out, the reasons behind del Toro’s departure could have been easily solved, but the filmmaker admitted to Collider that he had other things to do, which worked out pretty well considering he ended up winning a pair of Academy Awards for the project he chose to make instead.
“We were getting ready to do it, it was different from the first, but it had a continuation of many of the things that I was trying to do. Then what happened is -I mean, this is why life’s crazy, right? – they had to give a deposit for the stages at 5pm or we would lose the stages in Toronto for many months. So, I said, “Don’t forget we’re gonna lose the stages,” and 5 o’clock came and went, and we lost the stages. They said, “Well, we can shoot it in China.” And I go, “What do you mean we? I’ve gotta go do Shape of Water.”
Not only that, but the filmmaker admitted he still hasn’t seen Pacific Rim: Uprising, using an analogy that makes perfect sense for why he wasn’t interested in checking out the successor to a fantasy epic he’d crafted from the ground up.
“I didn’t see the final movie because that’s like watching home movies from your ex-wife. It is terrible if they’re good and worse if they’re bad, or the opposite. You don’t wanna know. So, I didn’t see it. I did read the final script, and it was very different. Some of the elements were the same but very different.”
The franchise is as good as dead on the live-action front, but Netflix kept the brand alive through animated series The Black, which managed to release two seasons before wrapping up last year.
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