BREAKING NEWS: Guillermo del Toro spends next FOUR years directing THE HOBBIT!!!

The announcement that Guillermo del Toro was hinting at during last weekend’s NY Comic Con has come.

Variety say that the Mexican director WILL direct The Hobbit and is moving out to New Zealand to spend the next FOUR YEARS with Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and the majority of the original Lord of the Rings crew to work on the picture.

This would hint that Peter Jackson’s involvement will be really close to the production.

Warner Bros, the studio who now own New Line (who are making this in conjunction with MGM) are not be balking at the size of the project. The two planned movies will be every bit as epic as the Lord of the Rings franchise was.

The films will be part Hobbit and part new stuff and what could be spliced together from the rest of Tolkien’s huge LOTR universe and will bridge the sixty year gap between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring.

“A true original, Guillermo is a cinematic magician who has never lost his child-like sense of wonder. He understands that the fantastic must be grounded in the real and that all stories are only ever a reflection of ourselves,” say Jackson and Walsh.

“We have long admired Guillermo’s work and cannot think of a more inspired filmmaker to take the journey back to Middle-earth. We are delighted ‘The Hobbit’ is in such trustworthy hands.”

Sad news is that for all of the projects that del Toro has been getting us excited over for the last 18 months which included…

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS

HELLBOY 3

TARZAN

FRANKENSTEIN

And everything else, will now be soooooo long away from actually happening with him being locked into The Hobbit for the next four years! He will now, not direct another movie till 2014.

What a commitment and you can see why it has taken this long for him to be 100% locked on.

I could go on and on and on and on about this news but sometimes it’s best to just say…

YES!!!!!

We will be covering this project EXTENSIVELY over the next five or six years. It’s gonna be a fun ride… can’t wait to return to Middle-Earth, to hear Howard Shore’s new and old score… to see Ian McKellen as Gandalf again and with a masterful director like del Toro. It’s rare we get what we want in Hollywood but we certainly did today.

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