Guillermo del Toro Updates ‘Hobbit’, ‘Frankenstein’
Director Guillermo del Toro spoke with reporters in Los Angeles to promote this week’s release of Hellboy II: The Golden Army on DVD.
Of course, the question about the third film in the series came up and del Toro replied, “You know, I think that they will not green-light it or not or they will not talk about it until the last Euro hits the piggy bank. The fact is the movie, even though it was dually sodomized by Hancock and The Dark Knight, still did theatrically better than the first movie, internationally is doing exceedingly better than the first movie. It really is in some cases doing 300 percent more business, and depending on the territory and globally I think is doing about 100 percent more business than the first one. Let’s see what happens with the DVD, and the people that make the decisions do it based on the calculator function of the iPod, not on the other one.
“I would beg them and amputate myself in order for them to wait for me, but I don’t control it. If they say, ‘No, no, no, we’re going to do it,’ I personally think this incarnation of the trilogy, I would love to finish because it’s not arbitrary that we went into a different direction on the second one. I really think when and if you see the three movies, you’re going to have a comedic one, a tragic one and you’re going to see three movies that are incredibly apart in registration one from another. It’s really exploring Hellboy in very different ways.”
When queried about casting for The Hobbit and bringing back actors from Lords of the Rings, he said, “Not yet. Just the ones that have been announced [Ian McKellen as Gandalf and Andy Serkis as Gollum]. There’s not lack of information. It’s not withholding. We really don’t have more information, because we’re writing. And literally, like every week, what you discover writing the two movies, writing the two stories, it changes. So every week there’s a discovery, and anything we say this week would be contradicted next week. Certainly that would be true in casting. Why create hopes or why create expectations if down the line you’re going to go, ‘You know what? That was not a good idea.’ So we won’t cast it until we finish writing.” (more…)
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