Trivia / Pacific Rim: Uprising

• Ascended Fanon: The fan-created Jaeger Azure Defiant appears in the background of a panel (Warning: NSFW Ads) of the Aftermath comic. Even the pose is the same.
• Box Office Bomb: Less severe than most, with a budget of $150 million, it has pulled in gross, $59,185,715 (domestic), $290,061,297 (worldwide). They actually went into the film knowing they had a certain marker to be profitable, as the first film cost more but was surprisingly popular in China and Chinese backers are what got the film made.
• B-Team Sequel: Guillermo del Toro was set to direct while the film was still in pre-production. While he remained as a producer, he announced via Twitter in February 2016 that Steven S. DeKnight would instead take over as director, so he could direct The Shape of Water instead.
• California Doubling: Zig-zagged. The Moyulan Shatterdome in the China sea (the film, along with Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), actually was filmed at the Oriental Movie Metropolis facility in China, which is owned by Legendary Pictures' parent company Wanda Group) and the scenes set in Australia were shot there. But played straight with the parts in the United States and Tokyo.
• Channel Hop: The first film was released by Warner Bros.; this film was released by Universal due to Legendary Pictures having switched distributors in the interim.
• Creator Killer: Along with The Great Wall, this film torpedoed Legendary's 2014 distribution deal with Universal, resulting in Legendary returning to Warner Bros. for most films from 2019 onward.
  • The director Steven S. DeKnight, also returned to television directing, and have not another film project.
• Dawson Casting: Most of the actors playing the teenage Shatterdome cadets were in their late teens or very early twenties at the time of filming, but played straight with some of them, such as Wesley Wong as Jinhai (then 30) and Levi Meaden as Ilya (then 29-30).
• Dueling Movies: Defied by the studio. It was previously going to open only a week after Black Panther, but the studio moved it back to March to avoid the competition. It allowed it to become the first film to dethrone Black Panther from the top spot.
• Franchise Killer: The film got much worse reviews than the first movie, from critics, general audiences, and fans, and was a Box Office Bomb, losing an estimated 60 million USD. The ending has a big Sequel Hook and was clearly meant to be a franchise jumping-off point, but, aside from a very short-lived animated spinoff that came and went with little splash, there has been no further news about followups.
• Missing Trailer Scene: A few lines are present in trailers but not in the movie, some intentionally misleading for sure. However one notable shot is of Lambert on the ground and presumably shooting at the swarm.
• Saved from Development Hell: There was a brief period of time after the first film when there was no set release date, nor even any confirmation on whether or not it would be released, other than Guillermo del Toro promising that it would eventually be made.
• Production Posse: Fans of Spartacus: Blood and Sand will recognize a few familiar faces (or, at least, familiar names). Probably most obvious, Nick Tarabay (Ashur) is the crook Jake is working with at the start of the film, and Shane Rangi (Ashur's fellow Syrian Dagan) is another member of the gang. Dustin Clare (Gannicus) is one of Shao's drone pilots, implied to be Lambert's former co-pilot. Dan Feuerriegel (Agron) also has a credited role.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Uprising is apparently very different from Del Toro's original plans. The only hard details we have are that there were going to be scenes in Shanghai and a desert (which is pretty suggestive, given the Kaiju's amphibious natures), and the final battle would have taken place in — and leveled — San Francisco. That said, it was certainly Del Toro who conceived merging Jaegers and Kaiju in this film and making the Kaiju brain drift an affair with two-way consequences. Del Toro would into more further detail in 2021 on his original plans with revealing that the main villain would've been a tech inventor receiving signals from another reality that would be revealed to be from the Precursors, Mako would've been the main protagonist and also survive to the end along with that the Precursors would have actually been humans from the future, whom had traveled back in time force resources.
  • The scene where Hakuja, Shrikethorn and Raijin are combined into the Mega-Kaiju was originally far more graphic and gruesome, with them being shown literally shredded into mincemeat by the Ripper drones and the resulting shapeless heaps of disemembered flesh being condensed and hardened into the Mega-Kaiju. The final film tones it down, obscuring most of the transformation with smoke and showing identifiable larger parts like arms, heads and tails being shifted around.
  • Charlie Hunnam would have reprised his role as Raleigh Becket, but there was a scheduling conflict as he was filming a remake of Papillon. Legendary Pictures could have forced him to appear in Uprising, which would have delayed Papillon's production, but they respected him enough not to do that to him. Still, they left his fate in Uprising ambiguous in order to open to door to future appearances of Raleigh in the franchise. (The novelization states he died of cancer before the events of the film, but its canonicity is debatable and could be easily ruled out.)
  • Obsidian Fury was almost named Black Mariah, which was the initial name they came up with and Steven S. DeKnight loved. Then he realized why he loved the name. . . it belongs to a recently-prominent Marvel Comics villain.
  • In February 2021, Steven DeKnight revealed on Twitter that he had hoped to make a third Pacific Rim film that crossed over with the MonsterVerse.
• Word of Gay: Charlie Day said in a number of interviews that he played Newt as being in love with Hermann. Steven DeKnight has also expressed approval of this interpretation.

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