The 2018 movie Guillermo del Toro swore he’d never watch: “I didn’t see it”
When you think of Guillermo del Toro’s movies, rich worlds come to mind, whether that be the horrific fantasy of Pan’s Labyrinth or the unusual human/fish romance in The Shape of Water.
What you don’t normally associate the Mexican filmmaker with, though, is your typical action blockbuster, even if he did prove that he was capable of just that when he made Pacific Rim in 2013.
On the surface, this CGI-laden movie of epic proportions, filled with huge monsters and robots, looked more like Michael Bay’s Transformers, rather than the creation of a truly dedicated artist. But really, what does del Toro love if not incredible special effects that bring worlds we can only imagine to the big screen?
Since he was young, del Toro has been fascinated by artists like Ray Harryhausen, whose animations for movies like Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans were revolutionary – the attention to detail that del Toro thus uses when crafting his visual worlds is really quite spectacular, and you only have to look at the makeup used to create the monsters in Pan’s Labyrinth and the otherworldly set design to see a filmmaker enamoured by cinema’s long history of extraordinary effects... You’re not going to find any traces of realism here, at least visually.
So maybe Pacific Rim made sense for him after all. Instead of drawing from your average mainstream Hollywood blockbuster, del Toro instead looked at more widespread influences, like anime. It was a success. To date, del Toro hasn’t managed to make a movie more financially viable, with the project making $411million against its $190m budget.
Of course, when something as successful as that comes along, it’s only a matter of time before a sequel is discussed. Del Toro was initially down to direct another monster movie, but a missed payment contributed to his decision to walk away from the project. He told Collider, “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.”
You can probably guess what happened: “So, I said, ‘Don’t forget we’re gonna lose the stages,’ and five 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.’”
So, with the possibility of shooting Pacific Rim 2 looking unlikely, he allowed the project to be handed over to another director – this sequel, Pacific Rim Uprising, was released in 2018, directed by Steven S DeKnight, but it wasn’t nearly as praised as the first film.
Del Toro couldn’t bring himself to watch it, knowing that whether it was good or bad, he wouldn’t enjoy watching something that should’ve been his. “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.”
Concluding, “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.”
