Steven DeKnight wanted to have a reference to John Carpenter's 'The Thing' in 'Pacific Rim Uprising'.
John Carpenter
The 55-year-old filmmaker helmed the sequel to Guillermo del Toro's sci-fi flick starring John Boyega and Scott Eastwood, and admitted during the editing process, he removed a scene which was a nod to the iconic 1982 alien horror movie.
He told Den of Geek: "There was an action scene that I came up with during the Shatterdome attack that I loved.
"It was my beloved child, but I was like, 'Ah right. Okay, it's going on a bit too long.' Jake (Boyega) and Lambert (Eastwood) were actually gonna make it inside Gypsy, and they were gonna fight one of the Kaiju drones, and they were gonna punch it so hard that it knocked its brain out.
"The brain was gonna fall to the ground, sprout legs and teeth, and try to eat the cadets.
"It was my nod to John Carpenter's 'The Thing'. But once we got in, it was like, not only was it massively expensive and taken more time shooting, it's like a top hat on top of a derby.
"It's just, let's focus on the story. Sometimes you can just go off on tangents that are great and wonderful, but the aggregate of too much is that the audience just gets exhausted."
The first film followed mankind's attempts to stop monstrous creatures known as Kaiju - who entered from breaches in the Pacific Rim - from destroying the planet.
Humans created giant robots called Jaegers - designed to be piloted by two humans locked together in a neural bridge.
However, humanity's hopes relied on a washed-up ex-pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba).
The new film 'Pacific Rim Uprising' - which is set 10 years after the original - follows Jake Pentecost (Boyega), the son of hero Stacker who sacrificed himself to save the world, who rises up to stand against the evolved alien race Kaiju alongside a rogue Jaeger to prevent humanity's extinction.
Tagged in John Carpenter Scott Eastwood John Boyega