Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro has a wide variety of films under his belt, from sci-fi action pieces like Hellboy and Blade II to gothic romance films like Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water. One of his most notable franchises Pacific Rim reached critical acclaim with the first film, but despite writing a script for a sequel, the film changed distributors and del Toro's script was scrapped when Steven S. DeKnight took the reins of the project.

It’s no secret the sequel, titled Pacific Rim: Uprising changed dramatically under DeKnight’s direction, which used a script by Jon Spaihts instead of del Toro’s original version. In an interview with The Wrap, del Toro delved into what his original version of the film looked like, which included one character having a more significant role.

The sequel we got thrusts the audience ten years into the future, where John Boyega’s Jake Pentecost leads a new generation of Jaeger pilots, and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi). is reduced to a minor character who is hastily killed off-screen.

Pacific Rim
Image via Warner Bros.

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But that’s not how del Toro envisioned it. In the interview, he described his film’s plot saying,

“The villain was this tech guy that had invented basically sort of the internet 2.0. And then they realized that all his patents came to him one morning. And so little by little, they started putting together this and they said, ‘Oh, he got them from the precursors.’ The guys that control the kaiju. And then we found out that the precursors are us thousands of years in the future. They’re trying to terraform, trying to re-harvest the earth to survive. Wow. And that we were in exo-bio-suits that looked alien, but they were not. We were inside. And it was a really interesting paradox.”

A stark difference to the sequel that was released, which saw few returning characters from the original film, and a steep decline in the quality of the visual effects. Following his original synopsis, del Toro also expressed the desire to focus on the character Mako, and see her develop past her original arc. “To me, the hero was Mako Mori.” Del Toro stated, “I wanted her not only to live, I wanted her to be one of the main characters in the second movie.”

It seems that fans were in for a treat with del Toro’s original vision, but sadly timing just didn’t line up. You can, however, enjoy more del Toro’s amazing storytelling in his new film Nightmare Ally which premieres in theaters December 17.