After his announcement of moving forward with Pacific Rim 2, Guillermo del Toro (Pacific Rim, Pan’s Labyrinth) recently revealed more potential plot elements for the second go-round between the jaegers (robots) and kaiju (monsters). 

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, del Toro mentioned a couple concepts that the second film may explore in further detail: the Drift, or the “neural link between pilots of the giant robots, or jaegers,” and the idea of a “portal that ripped a hole in the fabric of our universe.”  Though reluctant to reveal much more, del Toro said,

I think at the end of the second movie, people will find out that the two movies stand on their own. They’re very different from each other, although hopefully bringing the same joyful giant spectacle. But the tenor of the two movies will be quite different.

One of the biggest challenges del Toro faced for the first Pacific Rim was creating an original world without an already established lore or backstory (though Pacific Rim: Tales from Year Zero, a graphic novel written by co-screenwriter Travis Beacham, served as a prequel to the first film and was released around the same time the film hit theaters).  Del Toro admitted he had to compromise a plethora of content in order to accommodate the story into a single film.  Now, however, with the development of a comic book series and an animated show for FX, the director has high hopes that the second film will be able to expand upon the world of Pacific Rim.

The director also expressed his plan to make the second movie as “universal,” “humanistic,” and “multicultural” as the first film was, “to make characters from many nationalities or gender, to make them equal in the scope of the adventure…”  Though we don’t know which (if any) of the same cast members will appear in the second film, the director at least assured that he’s trying include “those that survived the first movie.”

Currently finishing production on his new film Crimson Peak, which will open October 15, 2015, Del Toro will start working on designs for Pacific Rim 2 in August.  He says that designing for a movie of that magnitude (the first film cost around $190 million) will take about nine months.

As we previously reported, Travis Beacham will return to help write the second film, along with Zak Penn, who helped write the story for The Avengers.  The film will likely be released early in 2017.