Guillermo Del Toro Wants To Return To Kaiju Genre After Pacific Rim

Published Sep 20, 2026, 12:20 PM EDT

Abigail is an editor for ScreenRant, currently writing and editing movie news. You may also have seen her thoughts on animated television, musical theater, and fantasy literature in Paste Magazine, Fantasy Hive, or The Oxford Blue. She has also written SR lists and op-eds covering movies, TV, and books as well. She is an English major through and through, having graduated with a B.A. from UC Santa Barbara and an MPhil from Oxford University.

Guillermo del Toro may return to the genre of one of his biggest hits.

The Oscar winner is coming off another successful year, with 2025's Frankenstein having earned a place among the Best Picture nominees, including Sinners and One Battle After Another, while his magnum opus, Pan's Labyrinth, will soon be back in theaters for its 20th anniversary this year. But he also recently said he would love to go back to another space of his filmography.

During an AMA session on Reddit, a fan asked del Toro, "Is there any chance that you would do a kaiju or giant robot movie again?" citing Pacific Rim as "one of [their] favorites." Del Toro responded: "I would love to go back. A kaiju-mecha intersection is my sweet spot. That's why I agreed to do Pacific Rim based on the outline by Travis Beacham."

Del Toro went on to delve into what the kaiju genre means to him, saying that "There's an ornamental, abstract beauty to some kaijus." He has been happy to see some of the new things he tried with Pacific Rim appear in subsequent kaiju movies, and touches upon themes of love and trust being important in his work. Check out his full comments below:

I would love to go back. A kaiju-mecha intersection is my sweet spot. That's why I agreed to do Pacific Rim based on the outline by Travis Beacham. The only thing I immediately said is that it should be two pilots for the robots, so that the story is about two people that need to learn to trust each other.

Oh my god, I tried so many new things in the way we shot the kaiju, that now I see in other kaiju movies, like the night and the rain, the neon lights. It was such a joy. To me, it's one of my favorite movies I ever shot. I adore it.

I remember when we were starting, I coined two terms. GothTech, meaning Gothic and tech combined. The other one was "Smart-Stupid," meaning the premise makes no sense but we have to treat it with the utmost seriousness. Because, of course, there are a hundred ways you would go about killing a monster that size before you say, Why don't we build a giant robot? But I said we should seriously render this really silly idea.

There are two things that I love about kaiju movies. There's an ornamental, abstract beauty to some kaijus. Some kaijus are based on a natural creature—a lobster, a reptile, a shark—but others are based on architectural, beautiful, ornamental designs that are almost like pieces of pop art. Take a character like Guiron, which is based on a knife. I wanted to bring all that into the movie. Some of the kaijus are very close to an animal—there’s one that looks like a gorilla—but there's another one that is completely crazy and has a knife on its head, but it's made of bone. There's love and affinity.

The Ultraman series even has a planet that they dedicated to me, called Planet Guillermo. Because I love them so much. I love those creatures: Ultra Q and Ultraman, and Ultra 7. They have the greatest creatures, because they are on the verge of being silly but they are always beautiful.

Pacific Rim came out in 2013, after a few of del Toro's best movies that established him as a prestige filmmaker but before his Oscar wins for 2017's The Shape of Water and 2022's Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio. The epic sci-fi feature grossed $411 million worldwide against a budget of $190 million, and was followed by a sequel, Pacific Rim: Uprising, in 2018, which was not directed by del Toro and was significantly less well-received.

Del Toro may be tied up with other projects for a while before he can work on a new kaiju movie. While David Prior's The Boy in the Iron Box, based on the serialized novella by del Toro and Chuck Hogan, is slated to come out sometime in 2026, del Toro is meant to be directing the animated film adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro's Arthurian fantasy novel The Buried Giant.

Moreover, del Toro has thrown out other ideas for movies he would want to make sometime in the far future. For example, when asked what "misunderstood villain" he would want to tackle next, del Toro said he would love to do a Phantom of the Opera adaptation, "because it's such a classic tale, but [he] would do it differently."

While Phantom of the Opera is thematically in line with the rest of del Toro's career, he has also long been associated with the Lovecraftian, particularly because of his dormant plans to adapt At the Mountains of Madness. But during this AMA, another user also asked del Toro what other H.P. Lovecraft stories he would want to do. Check out del Toro's answer below:

Most of his stories, by virtue of their length, are better adapted to one-hour television programs or 30-minute television programs. I would love to adapt The Thing On the Threshold, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, or The Outsider, which is a horror story that is point of view until the final image. Those are the ones that scared me the most or disturbed me the most. At The Mountains is the only one, I think, that is a full feature.

But I think it's hard to adapt Lovecraft, because he uses adjectives that are very open. So you’ve got to codirect, so to speak, every image. And when you make them into film, they become very precise. To me, the best adaptation of Lovecraft is Ridley Scott’s Alien, which is basically Mountains of Madness. Second-best adaptation for me is The Thing. I know it's not Lovecraft, but it's very Lovecraftian in its makeup effects language. I love In the Mouth of Madness. I love Stuart Gordon's Dagon. I love The Resurrected by Dan O'Bannon. It's full of craziness. There are a few movies that have been done in the right way.

Guillermo del Toro is evidently one of the most imaginative directors working today, and always has some ideas on hold. Hopefully, we will get to see more than a few of them, including another kaiju movie, come to light.

Guillermo del Toro