After spending nearly two years working on pre-production for the two-part The Hobbit film adaptation, director Guillermo Del Toro has announced he’s leaving the project behind. It’s a bitter blow for fans, many of whom saw Del Toro as one of the few people who could have succeeded in picking up where Peter Jackson left off.
Announcing the news on TheOneRing.Net, Del Toro said, “In light of ongoing delays in the setting of a start date for filming The Hobbit I am faced with the hardest decision of my life. After nearly two years of living, breathing and designing a world as rich as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, I must, with great regret, take leave from helming these wonderful pictures.”
The delays he’s talking about have to do with MGM, which owns a 50% stake in the Hobbit movies. While Warner did a deal that said they’d cover the other studio’s half of the budget if necessary, that can only go ahead once the future of MGM is secured. However the cash-strapped MGM is still currently in a financial quagmire after it failed to find a buyer when no one bid close to the asking price in the initial sale. Although efforts to find a new owner are ongoing, there’s no news on when things might be settled and the studio may still end up being broken up and sold piecemeal. With such uncertainty, it means that while early rumours suggested Del Toro should have already been on set filming, he’s still without the greenlight or a production start date, and therefore pretty much putting his entire life on hold while he waits.
Executive producer Peter Jackson added, “We understand how the protracted development time on these two films, due to reasons beyond anyone’s control – has compromised his commitment to other long term projects. The bottom line is that Guillermo just didn’t feel he could commit six years to living in New Zealand, exclusively making these films, when his original commitment was for three years.”
However Del Toro will continue co-writing the screenplays (both scripts are written but need fine-tuning), with Jackson adding that the next step is that “New Line and Warner Bros will sit down with us this week, to ensure a smooth and uneventful transition, as we secure a new director for The Hobbit. We do not anticipate any delay or disruption to ongoing pre-production work”.
However who that director will be is unknown, and there are few who would make fans feel as secure of Del Toro – unless of course Peter Jackson stepped back onboard, but at the moment he doesn’t seem to want to do that.