"Pacific Rim" question

I was curious about the movie being about a renaissance of the Jaegers when the Kaiju threat was renewed after a period of years. Why not just play it straight and show the original Kaiju-Jaeger war?

So that a pre-quel trilogy can be milked for another few million dollars?

There’s a prequel series supposedly in the works for Amazon Prime. There’s also a prequel book, Pacific Rim Uprising: Ascension available in various formats.

Because they wanted to play up the “band of old Jaeger pilots take on the Kaiju to save the world” plot. Jaegers were retired in favor of the Wall, when the Wall failed, and they saw that Kaiju were getting bigger and more frequent, the few remaining Jaegers had to figure out a way to defeat the Kaiju once and for all.

I think del Toro wanted to make a movie where the Jaeger were already a mature technology, and not a movie about how they were invented and first tested in battle. It’s why most tank warfare movies are set in WW2 instead of WW1 - better tanks, more interesting tank battles.

Precisely. The plot called for it. It’s kind of post-apocalyptic.