When does Pacific Rim take place?

Pacific Rim is a gigantic sci-fi monster movie about robots fighting Kaiju, but when does the epic war movie take place?

Directed by Guillermo Del Toro – from a script he co-wrote with Travis Beacham – Pacific Rim plays out in a near-future where inter-dimensional creatures have emerged from a portal at the bottom of the ocean, and set about destroying the planet.

To do battle, mankind builds giant robots – called Kaiju – with heroes played by the likes of Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, and Charlie Day taking the fight to the monsters.

The film hit screens in 2013, and was a modest hit, grossing around double its rumored $200 million. But when is the movie set?

When does Pacific Rim take place?

Pacific Rim is set in 2025, but the story doesn’t start there. Proceedings kick off in 2013 – the year the movie was shot – with those Kaiju emerging from ‘The Breach’ beneath the Pacific Ocean.

That’s also when humanity starts building ‘Jaegers’ – the giant robots controlled by pilots who are mentally melded by a process called ‘Drifting.’ The first battle that we witness plays out in 2020, when brothers Yancy and Raleigh Becket piloting a Jaegar called ‘Gypsy Danger’ to battle a monster known as Knifehead. A mission that’s ultimtately successful, but which ends in tragedy.

The movie then jumps forward five years, to 2025, which is where the majority of the film plays out, with a final effort to save the world before all is lost to the Kaiju.

Pacific Rim was followed by a sequel – Pacific Rim Uprising – which was released in 2018, and takes place in 2035, a decade after the so-called ‘Battle of the Breach.’ But the followup made considerably less money than its predecessor, so in film form at least, the Pacific Rim story ends there.