With Steven S. DeKnight at the helm, Pacific Rim 2 is set to hit the theaters on February 23, 2018. We can expect the movie to kick off its production within the next six or seven months. They have already added Star Wars: The Force Awakens star John Boyega to the cast roster, and are reportedly eying Fury star Scott Eastwood for another lead role.
But we haven't heard anything solid about whether stars from the original movie, like Charlie Hunnam or Rinko Kikuchi, will return for Pacific Rim 2.
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Guillermo del Toro, the man who directed Pacific Rim and will serve as a producer of the sequel, doesn't confirm who will come back and who won't. But what he does do is promise us that a good number of the original movie's cast will appear in the upcoming DeKnight venture. He says:
As a producer, I learned not to declare anything about a movie I'm not directing. I can tell you this "” a lot of the cast from the first movie is coming back. I leave those communications to Steven DeKnight. He's not only a director, but he's actually a guy I respect and admire, and it's his movie.
When del Toro is asked to weigh in on the casting of John Boyega as the son of Idris Elba's Stacker Pentecost, he claims that he admires the British actor "tremendously", and adds:
The idea for me is that this is a continuation of the great leadership character that was Idris Elba. It's a very different character but I love the idea of having a main character who is not a white Anglo-Saxon guy.
The 51-year-old filmmaker says that they were already doing Pacific Rim before "the heated conversation about diversity in film" got going, and he thinks their universe is "a huge proponent of that".
During the interview, del Toro also states that Pacific Rim 2 takes some ideas that they originally created for the animated series. He thinks that they need to let the live-action movies lead.
