Idris Elba Boards Guillermo del Toro's Futuristic Monster Movie PACIFIC RIM

The mysterious project which snagged the acclaimed director after his At the Mountains of Madness adaptation fell through is gearing up to begin principal photography this September.

Pacific Rim will be released during the summer 2013 and is produced by Thomas Tull and Jon Jashni for Legendary Pictures alongside it's director Guillermo del Toro. Last month is was revealed that Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam was the first addition to the mysterious film's cast, and recently comedian Charlie Day signed onto the project.

Thor and The Wire star Idris Elba is now officially attached to the film in a starring role. His next two movies, Prometheus with Michael Fassbender and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance with Nicolas Cage, are scheduled for theatrical release next year. Though it has yet to be confirmed or debunked as relevant to the upcoming film, a very detailed synopsis for the film appears to fall in line with the minimal information that has come to light regarding the project:

In alternate version of Earth in the near future, decades after a historic date in November 2012 when the first kaiju, a towering Godzilla-like beast, emerged from a hole in the Pacific Ocean and attacked the city of Osaka, Japan. The second is “The Anteverse,” another universe on the other side of that gaping portal, 5 miles below our ocean’s surface.

Since the first attack, the rim has been “spitting out” a variety of gigantic monsters at an increasing rate, which then stride out of the ocean and begin destroying sea-bordering cities, like Tokyo and Los Angeles. In order to combat these monstrous, otherworldly menaces, the military developed the “Jaeger” program, which trains teams of two pilots to jointly operate massive, building-sized mechanized suits of armor and high-tech weaponry.

Within the first act alone, we are given enough detailed background on the god-like Jaeger systems, its shared neural piloting system (called “pons”), and the relentless beasts. But Beacham is an absolute master at immediately establishing characters and their conflicts.

The central character is Raleigh Antrobus, 23, a skilled Jaeger pilot still wrestling emotionally with the loss of his co-pilot and biological brother, Yance, during a mission a year earlier. The ordeal has wreaked havoc on his mind spirit, leaving him with ghostly nightmares of the battle from the shared “pons” experience. After the initial setup, the damaged hero is recruited to re-join the task force in Tokyo, where pilots are in demand, and team with a fellow “leftover,” 22-year-old female Japanese pilot Mako Mori. Naturally, the language barrier (among other things) presents an issue for the out-of-sync duo, meaning an even steeper learning curve for the unprecedented pairing.

Meanwhile, Felicity “Flick” Kincaid, a journalist and Yance’s former fiancée, circles the globe (ours) to discover answers about this mysterious rift and the origins of its intensifying threat.