Key Takeaways
- Film Success: Pacific Rim earned $411 million globally, justifying a sequel.
- Streaming Popularity: Pacific Rim: Uprising is trending on HBO Max, reaching the Top 10.
- Cast Highlights: John Boyega and Cailee Spaeny are among the notable stars in the sequel.
- Cinematic Challenges: The franchise faced difficulties due to high production costs and mixed reviews.
Transformers had a one-of-a-kind premise when the first film was released. Years later, Real Steel brought a similar premise, but this time combined robots with wrestling. Then in 2013, Guillermo del Toro dropped Transformers machinery into a Godzilla-scale monster war. This new film followed two human pilots operating a skyscraper-sized weapon through a shared neural connection. While it didn’t go parabolic relative to Transformers, it still performed decently at the box office. Three years later, its sequel arrived and grossed $290.9 million worldwide against a production budget of $150 million, which was underwhelming when other costs were weighed in. That sequel is now trending in the U.S. on streaming.
It also arrived with a cast full of future stars — John Boyega was coming off the new <em>Star Wars</em> trilogy and Cailee Spaeny later led Priscilla and <em>Alien: Romulus</em>. Scott Eastwood, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, Jing Tian, and Burn Gorman round out the rest of the cast, some returning from the original like Day. Now eight years after its theatrical release, the sequel is climbing rather than merely appearing in HBO Max’s U.S. catalog. It entered the platform’s movie Top 10 at No. 6 on July 20, rose to No. 4 on July 21, and reached No. 3 on July 22. That’s not all though; the film also sat in the ballpark of Top 20 films in Mongolia and Zimbabwe.
The franchise is Pacific Rim, and we’re talking about <em>Pacific Rim: Uprising</em>, Steven S. DeKnight’s 2018 sequel, with del Toro producing rather than directing. Boyega plays Jake Pentecost, the estranged son of Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost, who returns to the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps when a new Kaiju threat emerges. Spaeny’s teenage engineer Amara Namani builds her own Jaeger from scraps, while Kikuchi returns as Mako Mori, and Charlie Day’s Newt Geiszler becomes central to the invasion. The movie holds just a 42% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 5.6/10 on IMDb, yet it still has managed to find streaming success on HBO Max almost a decade later.
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What kind of threat keeps you up at night ?
Fear is useful data — if you’re honest about what you’re actually afraid of .
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Why ‘Pacific Rim 3’ Didn’t Happen
The firstPACIFIC RIM earned $411 million worldwide against a reported $190 million budget, and scored 72% on Rotten Tomatoes. Those numbers were respectable enough to justify another attempt, especially with $309 million coming from outside North America.PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING then fell to $290.9 million worldwide on a $150 million budget, while its domestic gross dropped from $101.8 million to $59.9 million. Its critical reception wasn’t good either and, at the time of writing, has collapsed to 42%, with audiences giving it only 36% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The director Steven S.DeKnight later summarized the franchise’s problem directly and said that the films are really expensive.” His proposed third movie would have united Jaegers and liberated Kaiju before opening up into a multiverse.During an interview with Syfy,S.DeKnight also went on to add that he would personally love to see Guillermo del Toro return and do a third one.” While that hasn’t happened so far,the franchise’s story was later continued with a comics trilogy.
PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING is currently trending on<strong HBO Max in the U.S.Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
