“We start designing in three weeks. We get the first draft of the screenplay in three weeks; Zak Penn and I are co-writing and then there’s a long, long, long journey of drafts and design. It took nine months to design “Pacific Rim”; it will take nine months or more to design the second one. We start scouting for the movie in the summer next year, July, and then we start shooting in November. Then it’s a long year of post after we wrap and we’ll probably be showing the movie in January/February 2017 to test audiences … No, it’s all over the world this time. I want it to be different enough to the first one that you don’t feel you’re seeing the same movie. I’m doing a little more location-oriented stuff, there are night battles, but there are also daylight battles. The things we do in the action scenes is very different from the first one. We are expanding the mythology of the Anteverse. We are taking the characters into a completely different journey this time because Raleigh for me solved his problem the minute he was able to go full circle and save Mako by sacrificing himself, which is what he couldn’t do with his brother. He’s not on that journey anymore, he’s on a new journey.”

“We are still turning in a screenplay and a budget in three weeks. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not gone. We’re still on it,” he tells the magazine, before admitting, “I may do another movie in the middle.”

The on-again/off-again story of Pacific Rim 2 switches back to “on-again” with the announcement that Daredevil‘s Steven S. DeKnight will helm the sequel to 2013 international hit. Universal will release the film with Legendary producing.But it seems the project’s earlier incarnation, Pacific Rim: Maelstrom, has been abandoned. While Guillermo del Toro remains on board as an executive producer, Jon Spaihts provided a new script. And though Deadline reports the new incarnation is based on characters created by writer Travis Beacham and del Toro, it is unclear if any of the surviving from the first film will return.The film will be DeKnight’s directorial debut. As a writer, he has worked on shows like Angel and Smallville and created Spartacus. He also served as head writer on the first season of Netflix‘s Daredevil off the ground, but left shortly after production was complete.