Showing a large amount of faith in Guillermo del Toro‘s Pacific Rim, Legendary Pictures has hired the screenwriter who crafted the initial treatment, Travis Beacham, to get crackin’ on a second installment. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the production company is happy enough with early buzz to take the first steps toward developing a franchise. Of course, scripts are cheap relative to the finished product, so there’s always the chance that they could pull back on the reins if the film doesn’t meet their financial expectations. But if they’re happy…it means more monsters fighting robots in tropical locales. My personal fantasy is that if it hits big, it’ll ensure Beacham’s Killing on Carnival Row gets a greenlight and larger studio interest. That project — the future-set story of a detective hunting a serial killer who’s targeting mythical creatures —  got Tarsem Singh signed on a year ago but hasn’t yet been put into pre-production. Maybe a massively successful hit will be the catalyst it needs. Check out everything we’ve got on Pacific Rim

Though it feels like we’ve been talking about Guillermo Del Toro‘s Pacific Rim forever, it really hasn’t been quite that long, and information on the project has remained vague at best. The first quick bite on Pacific Rim (from back in 2011) reported that the film was about alien invaders, though we quickly learned that it was really “a monster movie” that centered on creatures emerging from the deep. When Charlie Hunnam signed on for a lead role in May of last year, we learned that he would be “one of the pilots of a giant robot who needs to climb back into the driver’s chair.” But since then, the terms “monster movie,” “robots,” and “mech suits” have been bandied about without any official connective tissue. But that’s changed. Today, Warner Bros. has finally released an official synopsis for Pacific Rim, one that ties together all those seemingly disparate parts, while also clarifying both Hunnam’s role and Rinko Kikuchi‘s part in the film. It is, in a word, awesome. Check out the full press release and synopsis after the break.

The last few days have been pretty huge for director Tarsem Singh. First, his latest feature Immortals opened up to less-than-stellar to fairly middling reviews. Then he shocked the cinematic world with the completely ridiculous trailer for his next film Mirror, Mirror. And finally, he’s capped off his week by becoming attached to another film, this one called Killing on Carnival Row. According to Deadline Shahkot, Killing on Carnival Row was the first big spec script sale made by Travis Beacham, who has gone on to write things like Clash of the Titans and the upcoming Pacific Rim, but who never saw his first effort get produced. Killing on Carnival Row is described as a noir fantasy thriller set in a future city that resembles 18th century London much more than any sort of future city we usually imagine. Guillermo Del Toro was circling the project for a while, but like with most things Guillermo Del Toro, that didn’t end up working out. All of that previous stalling seems to be over though, because the producers putting this project together have said they now have studio backing, though they won’t reveal from who. And in Singh they feel like they’ve finally found their man to direct.

Earlier in the day, I typed a news post while standing up because I’d jumped out of my chair for joy. At the Mountains of Madness was finally set to go into production this summer. The record is now being corrected, and it turns out that it was false joy and pipe dreams put forth by producer Don Murphy trying to pressure an answer from Universal. That answer is no. It’s unclear why, and I’m checking with Universal for their side of the story, but the assumption seems to be that the R-rating and cost were a bit too much for them to handle. Instead, Guillermo Del Toro might move on to deliver a PG-13 big-budget piece of work called Pacific Rim that was written by Clash of the Titans writer Travis Beacham and deals with the world defending itself from alien monsters in the future. Del Toro and monsters is a good fit, and it’s set up at Legendary, but its high concept sounds eerily familiar. Like, say, Battleship. Or Battle: Los Angeles. That’s a shallow assessment, but that doesn’t mean it’s incorrect.