Pacific Rim Gets Box Office Boost From China, Might Just Be Enough for a Sequel

The folks behind Pacific Rim haven’t exactly been silent on what they’d do with a sequel, with Guillermo del Toro already promising a kaiju/jaeger hybrid monster and more digging into the implications and consequences of humans drifting with the kaiju hivemind. All that depends, however, on the movie’s performance at the box office: no one’s really certain that Pac Rim will make more than it took to create and promote, and if it does, it’ll be primarily up to the film’s pull at the international box office.

Fortunately for the hopeful, Pacific Rim just bagged Warner Bros. biggest opening in the Chinese movie market in history.

Reportedly, the day one numbers for the movie’s opening yesterday were at $9 million, nearly 25% better than the biggest Harry Potter opening in China. This puts its global total at $229 million, just a hair over its production budget, and into the territory of eating up its marketing budget as well. With the film grossing that much while just barely open in China, and  Spanish, Brazilian, and Japanese (where I would be genuinely shocked if it did not make a big impact) box offices still waiting on the its arrival, that certainly leaves some space to push it into the realm of profitable. That means, according to Deadline:

Momentum is building for a Pacific Rim sequel based on the international box office for the Legendary Pictures/Warner Bros summer tentpole.

China is something of an up and coming market for American blockbusters, one that studios are tentatively starting to pander to, most notably this summer with Iron Man 3, which featured two stars of Chinese cinema and an extra scene added to the movie only in Chinese markets. As to whether this market will make Pacific Rim into a franchise remains to be seen, but having read a lot of the fine details Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro baked into the background of the setting, I would love to see a return to it.

(via Deadline.)