Guillermo del Toro Will Journey to Middle-earth

Reuters is reporting Thursday that Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro will direct two movies based on the J. R. R. Tolkien book The Hobbit.

Plans to make a two-part precursor to the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings, based on Tolkien's three-volume follow-up to his Hobbit story, were announced in December after settlement of a bitter legal dispute cleared the way for the project.

Del Toro, whose credits include 2006's visually stunning Pan's Labyrinth, will move to New Zealand for the next four years to work on both Hobbit films with executive producer Peter Jackson, who directed all three The Lord of the Rings movies.

New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios have said that filming will begin in 2009, with tentative release dates set of 2010 for the first film and 2011 for the sequel.

"We have long admired Guillermo's work and cannot think of a more inspired filmmaker to take the journey back to Middle-earth," Jackson and his producing partner, Fran Walsh, said in a statement.

The plans call for del Toro to work back-to-back on The Hobbit and its sequel, which will deal with the 60-year period between that story and The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings.

The Hobbit, which Tolkien wrote for his children and first published in 1937, is set in a fictional land called Middle-earth, inhabited by elves, dwarves, wizards and a diminutive race known as Hobbits, including the central character Bilbo Baggins.