After months of rumors, speculation and conflicting reports, it’s finally official: Guillermo del Toro will direct The Hobbit and its sequel for New Line and MGM.
The announcement came Thursday afternoon jointly from exec producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, New Line president Toby Emmerich, and Mary Parent, newly named chief of MGM’s Worldwide Motion Picture Group reports Variety.
New Line is overseeing development and will manage production. Both films are being co-produced and co-financed by New Line Cinema and MGM, with Warner Bros. distributing domestically and MGM handling international.
Del Torro will move to New Zealand to film The Hobbit and its sequel. The films are expected to cover the 60 years leading up to the start of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The films will be filmed back to back.
While a script isn’t yet finalized, it’s expected the writing team of Jackson, Walsh and Philippa Boyens who worked on the adaption of the Lord of the Rings novels will collaborate with del Toro for these two films. Filming could begin as early as next year with a target date of 2011 and 2012 for the two films to be in theaters.
nice! the hobbit probably won’t have the same feel as LOTR but I’m sure it’ll be great in it’s own way with del Toro directing.
The fact that they will be using the New Zealand Location hopefully, will help it to keep a uniform feel with LOTR. The fact that Peter Jackson will still be involved in some way also gives me hope that something good will come out of this.
bad idea, lets hire the gur who produced a commie piece of trash like pan’s labyrinth to direct a work written by a catholic/christian and very much anti commie, like tolkien.
this is as dumb as hiring a cheapie horror movie director and removing the christian elements from the books which was done.
even so p.j. would have been a better choice. it is very hard to believe jackson directed those 3 movies looking at his track record of very bad cheap killing movies and b grade horror films.
he did play up the gore and horror element with the orcs which was not at all in the books. don’t get me started with the replacing of glorfindel with arwen, or the skateboard shield thing down the stairs or all the bad drawf midget jokes.