Salon.com's Andrew O'Hehir has an excellent short piece on why New Line Cinema and Producer Peter Jackson's decision to bring in famed Spanish director Guillermo del Toro to direct the two forthcoming Hobbit films is a bad one. O'Hehir notes that del Toro has, in the past, said that he hates Tolkien and the LOTR universe in interviews, and that his style is dramatically more dark / Gothic than Jackson-via-Tolkien's LOTR films (as seen in Pan's Labyrinth, one of my favorite films in recent memory).

Perhaps the money quote though, is when O'Hehir notes the trouble with making these two folks in the first place:

And where did the brilliant idea to make a "Hobbit" sequel -- a movie that will presumably cover the 60-year gap between the stories told in "The Hobbit" and in "The Lord of the Rings" -- actually come from? If you read all the back-and-forth stories closely, it becomes clear that New Line executive Mark Ordesky at some point told Peter Jackson that the studio had acquired rights to make both "The Hobbit" and a sequel, presumably based on Tolkien's fragmentary back-story information about what happens in his fictional universe between the two novels. A less kind way of saying this is that any "Hobbit" sequel won't really be a Tolkien adaptation; Jackson and Walsh and Boyens and del Toro and Ordesky and, I don't know, some guy in the Warner Bros. lunch room will be making the shit up.

Interesting!