The Hollywood Reporter is, well, reporting that Guillermo Del Toro is now officially in talks to direct both The Hobbit and its sequel. This. Is. Awesome.
Their story doesn't really hold any concrete facts or give us any new information on the film, but it's very encouraging to hear that Del Toro is at the very least on the shortlist of directors who might handle the prequels to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Del Toro already has a lot of films on his plate, so he'd have to clean house a little if he took this on. Principal photography is set to start in 2009. Del Toro is currently finishing off Hellboy 2 and then had plans to make a new version of Frankenstein, a long-planned adaptation of HP Lovecraft's At The Mountain's Of Madness and ghost story 3993.
He'd also expressed some interest in directing the final Harry Potter movie. But when we spoke to the series producer David Heyman recently he said that Del Toro was sadly not really in the running because "he's rather busy", despite Del Toro telling Heyman that he'd like to make the movie because "I want to kill your children". We guess you can't have everything. We gladly sacrifice all of those other projects to see Del Toro's take on The Hobbit.