Well, we all know that Peter Jackson is producing this prequel to his ultra-successful Lord of The Rings trilogy, and so far director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, Mimic) was an obvious and pretty reasonable choice. Although he had made some controversial comments, in a 2006 interview he was quoted saying “I don’t like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits, […] I don’t like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff”. But after he signed on, he immediately started loving all this stuff(well daaaaa). And
know he pulled out, announcing that he will be concentrating on some other project. My personal opinion is that he did not have enough of vision and craziness to imagine and create immensely complex world of The Hobbit. And let the rumor factory begin producing its crap so far there are many rumors about who will take his place from Jackson himself to Tim Burton(I would rather see Megan Fox directing than him, that is how big of failure I think it would be). BTW, Del Toro’s in his last interview stated: We have designed all the creatures. We’ve designed the sets and the wardrobe. We have done animatics and planned very lengthy action sequences. We have scary sequences and funny sequences. So as you can see everything is moving along nicely, well except for the director. Bilbo Baggins character is also the source of many rumors since we do not know yet who will be playing him, so far Daniel Radcliffe, David Tennant, Shia LaBeouf, James McAvoy and Erryn Arkin were all rumored to play Bilbo Baggins. Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, Hugo Weaving are confirmed for the movie, and I am very happy to see Gandalf again in the original performance. Ron Perlman and Doug Jones, Del Toro’s bitches (they are in almost every movie that he directed) were also rumored to appear in this movie, but with his departure we do not know what will happen…
Movie is set to be released in the December of 2012, if everything works out.