Though Pacific Rim 2 was removed from Universal's release schedule, development on the project continues. Guillermo del Toro will step aside to let Daredevil showrunner Steven S. DeKnight sit in the director's chair and screenwriter Travis Beacham has made room for Zak Penn and Jon Spaihts to work on the script. Now, The Hollywood Reporter has the news that one more screenwriter has joined the project, Derek Connolly. He co-wrote Jurassic World and more recently completed the script for Kong: Skull Island and Jurassic World 2.
It's presently unclear whether Connolly was brought on board to refine the screenplay or if he's working on a page-one rewrite.
As part of del Toro's ambitious plans for his budding franchise, the Hellboy director stated he wanted to develop comic books, anime and video game tie-ins. A single-player fighting game was released to generally negative reviews for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in 2013. A prequel graphic novel Pacific Rim: Tales from Year Zero was written by Beacham and released in 2013.