Despite falling short of box office expectations, it appears a sequel to 2013's
Pacific Rim is defintiely happening. John Boyega, who played Finn in
Star Wars: The Force Awakens has joined the cast as Stacker Pentecost's son. A few course correcting actions taken by Legendary Pictures include hiring Steve DeKnight (
Daredevil season one) to replace Guillermo del Toro in the director's chair. Del Toro remains involved with the project as an executive producer and script writer. The film is currently without a release date but is expected to be released somet ime in 2018.
As Stacker's biological son, it will be intresting to see how Finn's character interacts with his adopted sister, Rinko Kikuchi's Mako. The first film definitely gave no hint of Stacker having a family or a son that's also a jaeger pilot. The sequel will have to give a pretty convincing reason why such a relevant aspect of one of the film's most important characters was omitted.
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, Jon Spaihts and, Derek Connollt (Jurassic World, Kong: Skull Island) to write the sequel. 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.