Pacific Rim Is Stomping Onto TV With New Prequel Series

The world of Pacific Rim is making a giant-robot-legged leap to the small screen. Variety reports that Legendary Entertainment and Shadow and Bone‘s Eric Heisserer are teaming up on a new TV series set in the world of the kaiju-vs-mecha franchise.

“We are thrilled to launch our partnership with Eric, Chronology, and Carmen [Lewis, co-founder of production company Chronology], with a new entry in the epic, globally popular Pacific Rim universe,” Jason Clodfelter, president of Legendary Television, said in a statement provided to Variety. “We are certain their vision will make for an enthralling expansion to Legendary’s beloved franchise.”

The Pacific Rim series will be the first in Chronology’s first-look TV deal with Legendary, designed to “develop and shepherd IP-driven and related projects” for the studio, according to Variety.

Little was revealed about the series, other than that it will act as an “origin story” for the franchise. Set in a near future where much of the world has been devastated by the emergence of giant monsters called Kaiju—flooding into the world via an interdimensional rift discovered in the Pacific Ocean—Pacific Rim follows the establishment of the “Jaeger Program,” an international military force that develops giant robots operated by multiple pilots with their minds synced together. The first Pacific Rim movie launched in 2013, and was followed by a maligned sequel, Uprising, in 2018, but the franchise has flourished beyond the box office since, with the Netflix anime Pacific Rim: The Black and several comic series.

Whether or not the series will cover the early days of Kaiju-kind’s appearance on earth, or the development of the Jaegers and their initial battles against the monsters, remains to be seen. But if Monarch: Legacy of Monsters proved you could do the kind of scale and scope of Legendary’s other big monster series, Godzilla, on a streaming series budget, then maybe there’s hope for a lot of fun monster and robot action here, too.

We’ll bring you more on Legendary’s plans for Pacific Rim as and when we learn them.

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