Pacific Rim

[silvermoonlight]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umtOGzti-XQ

Yeah this is totally going down the Uprising route because 2 kids could totally maintain a huge machine on their own...

[Blockio]

Honestly that seems like an extremely premature conclusion. Just because there is one plot point that might be similar to Uprising doesn't mean the whole thing will be bad. The basic premise for the character's motivations already sounds a hell of a lot better than anything Uprising produced; not to mention that we do see other people in the back working on it.

[Bagheera]

I might actually watch that.

[Settie]

I'm confused, is this like an alternate timeline or something? It has a way more post apocalyptic feel than any of the movies had, so i'm not sure how connected it's suppose to be , if at all, to the movie universe. Still, there's enough there worth checking it out.

[C.T.1290]

I’ve watched the first season of Pacific Rim: The Black, and I’ve enjoyed it so far. I’m waiting for the new season to come out. I haven’t seen uprising, and I’m rewatching the first film after a long time, and from what I can tell and read on the Wikipedia page, the anime series is set upon the first two films, like an expansion of some sort.

[Blockio]

Oh yeah, I watched it with a friend a while ago, too, completely forgot we had this thread; The Black is everything I want out of a 7-epiusode mecha OVA. I look forward to the second season, and the plastic robots.

[Bagheera]

The Black was pretty good, but the story needs to give Haley a break with all the guilt tripping. It places the blame for her friends' deaths squarely at her feet, while ignoring the fact that Copperhead had to be in the area for the noise she made to mean anything. If he was roaming around in the vicinity like that it was only a matter of time before he found their village, no matter what Haley did or didn't do, and yet this never seems to occur to anybody in the show.

But apart from that it was pretty good!

[Blockio]

I see where you're coming from, but I quite disagree. It's not the show that is putting the blame on Haley, it's herself; no matter if it's true or not, I find it not exactly difficult to believe that she would think she's to blame after that, coincidental as it may have been

[Bagheera]

Given that nobody challenges Haley’s account of things, even after she’s drifted with them, it seems obvious the show is treating Haley’s account of things as a matter of fact rather than just her perspective on things.

[Blockio]

Gave The Black S2 a watch, still a damn solid show. Finished up the story nicely, will live as my new textbook example of how to do a mecha OVA well.

[Gus Hanson]

I have only seen Guillermo's original movie in the franchise. Based on what the fans and critics have said about Uprising sucking without him in the director's seat, I have a question: Under what conditions would the bigwigs bring back Guillermo for at least one or two movie sequels? Especially if the del Toro sequels bring back Mako Mori and Raleigh Becket still being the stars and not a dishonorable demise to her character in the sequel.

[Gendo'sPapa]

I have a question: Under what conditions would the bigwigs bring back Guillermo for at least one or two movie sequels?

I don't believe there are any. Since the first Pacific Rim Del Toro has won Oscars for Best Picture & Best Director for The Shape of Water and with that he has acquired the clout and support to make all his passion projects up to a certain budget - like a remake of Nightmare Alley & his upcoming stop-motion Pinocchio film set in Italy during the rise of facisim in pre-WWII Italy - and is basically living the filmmakers dream. Del Toro also has a long history of developing projects that weren't greenlit by studios for various reasons and I'm sure a lot of those - plus whatever else has has developed recently, the man is a prodigious writer - now have a better change of being made.

With all that freedom available to him I just can't see any reason he'd want to return to a franchise that tossed him aside and bastardized his original ideas for a subpar sequel and a failed Netflix series. If there was any old series he'd want to return to it would probably be Hellboy which he always intended to be a trilogy but the third film never got made.

Even more so: I just think the simple economics of the series make any future films an unlikely scenario. These are movies about giant robots fighting monsters and the budgets needed to make films of this scale - not including marketing, etc - ends up being around $200 million per picture. The original Pacific Rim barely made over $100m at the US box office and only made a small - very small - profit was cause the film over performed in China. It's one of the movies that convinced Hollywood they could rely on Chinese box office receipts to make a profit.
By the time the sequel, Pacific Rim: Uprising, got made - also costing somewhere around $200m - Hollywood business in China had changed because the country was now producing their own homegrown blockbusters. PR 2 made less than $60m in the US and didn't hit $100m in China. With China routinely deciding not to screen Hollywood movies in their country for insane reasons - Spider-Man: No Way Home didn't run in China because the country wanted Sony to remove the Statue of Liberty - relying on China is not a bet studios want to take anymore on giant films.

The Netflix series coming and going without making any impression whatsoever doesn't help things.

Pacific Rim as a brand might keep living on in comics or something like that but I think the audience just isn't there for more feature films.

[Natalie the Cat]

I would like to see him go back to Hellboy just for the weirdness of a movie being a De-Boot instead of a Re-Boot.

[AsukaisLiterallyMe]

A Hellboy film by Del Toro is almost guaranteed at this point. As is a "At The Mountains of Madness" adaptation (I can dream can't I?).

I Agree with Gendo's Papa on Del Toro probably not wanting to return to the Pacific Rim franchise.

I used to be the biggest fanboy of the first film, and to a certain extent I still am, but seeing other people get a crack at it and not him (and the deeply meh Uprising) made me cool on the series. This thread reminded me that it even existed, I had not even *thought* about it for years now; and this is for a film I used to constantly bring up as an example of a summer blockbuster that's not a made by committee for focus groups and mass audiences bland tv dinner.

A film that was both high concept and low concept.

[Blockio]

"Deeply meh" is an apt description for Uprising, yeah. The myriad of dubious decisions in the wrting have been discussed to no end, but the fucking tie-in mobage had more weight to its movement than basically any shot of that movie, that's an order of magnitude of screenwriting fuckup that you really don't see every day.
Although for all of Uprising's shit-ness, The Black was a quite lovely show, I do recommend checking that one out

[AsukaisLiterallyMe]

I'm not the biggest tv show person as they tend to drag, but I'll keep it in mind.

Did they at least fix Uprising's issue of every mecha fight taking place in a harshly lit daytime scene?

Is it decently written? I'm not expecting or hoping for high art but there's a lot of stuff I want to see/play/read so nowadays I tend not to bother with "empty calories" media.

[Blockio]

The Black is... I want to say 10 or 12 episodes, so quite short. And yes, the story and screenwriting are both quite good; it's a lot more personal stakes, smaller scale story than the movies, which quite distinctly works in the show's favor

[AsukaisLiterallyMe]

I'll give the first season a chance, see if it's my speed, before I fall into a few rewatches.

[Blockio]

It's not so much a typical season structure as it is a case of part 1 and part 2 of the story