'Pacific Rim 2' Could Be Cancelled For Same Reason As 'Tron 3

There is a big, juicy piece in The
Hollywood Reporter today about the push- and-pull between Legendary and Universal/ Comcast . A lot
of it has to do with the whole “ Skull
Island goes to Warner Bros./ Time Warner ” thing with a little bit of
bad blood concerning Legendary’s
Thomas Tull perhaps taking too much credit for mega-hits like The Dark Knight and Jurassic World over the years.
I will admit that I am a little
disheartened to hear that Universal
wasn’t thrilled about a film as expensive as Crimson Peak going out as an R, but that may be for another day if I get a chance to discuss their still worthwhile
slate of theatrical horror films this year.
The big geek news concerns the now
uncertain fate of Pacific Rim 2. The film was slotted for August 4, 2017, before it was pulled off the schedule a week or so ago. At this moment, its future is up in the air — it may never actually happen.
In other words, it may suffer the fate of Walt Disney’s Tron 3. And if that
happens it will be, I would argue, for the same general reasons.
As much as some of us love Pacific Rim (and that I didn’t care for it doesn’t mean I don’t admire what it does right and respect the fellow critics/nerds who love it), the Guillermo del Toro movie wasn’t a smash hit in 2013. At a cost of
$190 million, the Warner Bros. release earned just $101 million in America and only avoided flop status due to strong business in China, where the film grossed $111 million and pushed the worldwide total to $411 million. A sequel
was seemingly green-lit last year, this time for Universal since Warner Bros. and Legendary mostly parted ways. That was in June of 2014, where Universal was working its way through a robustly successful 2014 that lacked a single conventional tent pole. For a studio that
perhaps wanted an extra franchise to impress the stockholders, a Pacific Rim sequel made, well, “sense” is too strong a word, but it wasn’t a terrible idea if costs could be contained or if a movie star could be procured.
A $160 million Pacific Rim 2 starring Vin Diesel is a better bet than a $190m Pacific Rim starring Charlie Hunnam. But then 2015 happened. Universal had a stunningly solid year with franchises like Jurassic World, Pitch Perfect 2 , Fifty Shades of Grey , Minion s, and Furious 7
earning record domestic and worldwide grosses for the studio. And with next year offering dicier propositions like WarCraft, The Huntsman , and yet another Bourne movie (and Universal is almost sure to get hit with “slump” headlines as a result of 2016 not measuring up to 2015), maybe Pacific Rim 2 isn’t a chance that Universal feels like taking right now. Obviously if Crimson Peak, the Tom Hiddleston-
Jessica Chastain haunted house thriller, hits it big, the situation may change. But for the moment, like Disney when they pulled the plug on Tron 3, Universal is in a rare position of having too many franchises to juggle, to the point where they really don’t want to take a chance on an expensive and risky proposition.
Disney has the Marvel movies, the Star Wars films, the Pixar animated films, the Disney animated films, the “live action version of animated classic” franchise, and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. As such, there was no reason to roll the dice on Tron 3. And with Universal now having surefire franchise plays in Fast 8, Jurassic World 2 , Despicable Me 3, Pitch Perfect 3, Fifty Shades Darker, The Purge 3, Ride Along
2 , Neighbors 2, and whatever else might break out in 2016 (such as Monster High or whatever becomes of their alleged monster universe franchises), a not terribly surefire proposition like Pacific Rim 2, with the important caveat that we’ve already seen one film barely avoid being a massive money loser, doesn’t seem like a must-have item
on the docket.