'Pacific Rim' sequel springs to life with the addition of John Boyega

LOS ANGELES -- As Finn, John Boyega needed a pilot. Now he gets to be one. 

The Star Wars: The Force Awakens star will surely drift into the controls of a Kaiju-fighting Jaeger in the sequel to Pacific Rim, a movie no one was sure was moving forward until the Monday morning casting announcement from Legendary Pictures. 

And they plan to get shooting soon -- possibly by the end of this year.

Boyega will play the son of Stacker Pentecost, the stirring-rally-speech-giving commander from the 2013 original played by Idris Elba. (Pentecost sacrificed himself at the end of Pacific Rim, so there's scant chance of him returning.)

Steven S. DeKnight, whose credits hail mostly from television (Daredevil, Spartacus: War of the Damned) takes over helming from Guillermo del Toro, who produced and directed Pacific Rim from an original script by Travis Beacham.

This is an interesting call for fanboy-fare-focused Legendary, who's now in partnership with Universal after years with Warner Bros. -- Pacific Rim, which cost something close to $200 million to make and probably half that much for WB to market, made only $411 million worldwide (about $100 million of that in the U.S.).

That's not nearly enough to make this sequel a slam-dunk -- you usually want a four- or five-times multiplier to get into that range -- so in fact, it's a bit of head-scratcher. Especially after a couple of major sequel flops in Alice: Through the Looking Glass and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows.

But as Pentecost told us in Pacific Rim: "At the edge of our hope, at the end of our time, we have chosen not only to believe in ourselves, but in each other." 

So what the hell, let it rip, fellas.

See you in the drift.

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