I Scoff At Your Piddly Five Year Plan

by Furious
September 4th, 2008

So, if you don’t already know who Guillermo del Toro is, you’ll have plenty of opportunities in the coming years. Per Variety, the director of Hellboy, Blade II, and Pan’s Labyrinth worked out some details of his deal with Universal Pictures to keep him busy through at least 2017.

He originally signed a three year deal with the studio in 2007, but since he signed on to direct The Hobbit movies, the Universal deal wouldn’t really take effect until 2013 or so. Yep, that’s five years to make the two Hobbit movies. After that, del Toro and Universal have no less than four movies lined up. There are remakes of Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Slaughterhouse-Five and an adaptation of an unpublished Dan Simmons novel, “Drood.” And if things work out, maybe an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness.”

It sounds like a pretty good deal for both parties. Although he may have stumbled a little bit with Hellboy II: The Golden Army, del Toro has shown a fairly steady progession of financial and critical success, and he’s certainly one of the hottest names in Hollywood right now, with his name recently headlining the marketing for The Orphanage, which he only produced. By the time the Hobbits come out, he’ll be as big as Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is now, with legions of fanboys hanging on his every breath.