Drum roll please.....It's now official... Guillermo Del Toro has signed a contract to direct the Hobbit and he will be joining forces with producer Peter Jackson over the next four years in New Zealand to bring us the much anticipated prequel to the Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit is tentatively scheduled to arrive in theater's in 2011...but...here is the interesting part...there is a sequel...In 2011 the team of Del Toro and Jackson will release the "long discussed theoretical middle story" that connects the Hobbit to the Lord of the Rings. There is no book explaining these two stories but apparently Tolkien left behind hundreds of notes and concepts that will used to bridge the gap between these two stories...

Del Toro has a reputation of potentially being the next great fantasy film director in the league of Jackson, Speilberg, and Lucas. His background is steeped in the world of fairy tales and he has already directed some very interesting and critically acclaimed fantasy stories such as Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone, Hellboy, Mimic, and the upcoming Hellboy II: Golden Army...and...he is currently working on a film called Saturn and the End of Days, which is a story about a young boy who witnesses the rapture and the Apocalypse and apparently lives to tell the story...I have heard an in depth interview with Del Toro and he does seem to possess the creative/fantasy genes in spades.

I am excited and jazzed...but...apparently not everyone thinks this is a match made in heaven. Andrew Heir of Salon, who interviewed Del Toro at Cannes in 2006 asked Del Toro what he thought about Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and Del Toro said, "I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don't like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits -- I've never been into that at all. I don't like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff."....Hehir goes on to say this about Del Toro, "His aesthetic is darker, more Gothic and more grotesque than the Tolkien-via-Jackson universe; it derives more from the medieval mire of middle-European fairy tale than from the high-toned, pre-modern northern European epics Tolkien was channeling."...While it is true that many of Del Toro's films do lend themselves to the "dark side", that doesn't mean he can't suck it up and do one for the team...which is my hope...As far as the challenge of two heavy weights working together, that remains to be seen, but Peter Jackson has always come across to me as a lovable current day hobbit who is easy to get along with...and...if my take on Jackson is correct and Del Toro works his magic on his end than the fans of the Middle Earth may be rewarded with another great adventure in a couple of years...