After Peter Jackson’s mesmerising Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tom Huddleston wonders if Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro can do justice to the prequel

The announcement finally came: Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro is 100 per cent confirmed as the man to helm a two-part adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings prequel, The Hobbit. Del Toro will be moving to New Zealand for the next four years to focus all his energies on the project, working in tandem with Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and the visual-effects team WETA to bring the films to fruition. Though there are no details on casting or script as yet, it is assumed that Sir Ian McKellen will be returning to the role of the ageless Gandalf. All we know about the films themselves is that one of them will be a straight adaptation of The Hobbit, while the other will span the 60-year period between that story and its epic successor.

Tolkienites worldwide will be rubbing their hairy hands together at this news, but is del Toro really the right director for the job? On the surface, there seems to be no one better: often touted as Mexico’s answer to Peter Jackson, the two share a love of deep fantasy with a focus on character and narrative consequence rare in films of that genre. They both started out on small-scale, low-budget horror projects before upping stumps to Hollywood (with varying degrees of success), but both have kept one foot firmly rooted in the soil of their homeland. Both have brought an unprecedented level of darkness and emotional intensity to the fantasy genre, and both are deeply beloved by the online fanboy community.

But the fact remains that del Toro has never handled a project on this scale before. His previous big-budget studio experiments – Hellboy and Blade 2 – were entertaining but fairly unsuccessful, unable to marry the director’s ambitious comic-book storylines with the logistics of mainstream storytelling (though advance word on Hellboy 2 is extremely positive). Del Toro’s more successful forays into the fantasy genre – Spanish-language efforts The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth – were both notably smaller projects, confined to one location, weaving a claustrophobic fairy-tale atmosphere rather than the grand heroics required for a Tolkien adaptation.

And what will these adaptations entail? The Hobbit itself is a fairly straightforward road narrative, though it’s likely Jackson will push to widen the scope, taking in such off-page action as Gandalf’s battle with the Necromancer, and Sauron’s ensuing flight to Mordor. As a consequence, less important material is likely to be cut: the Norse-inspired passage with the mysterious bear-man seems to go. The other problem with The Hobbit in relation to Jackson’s envisioning of the Rings universe is its relative innocence: there are a lot of pranks, pratfalls and daft musical interludes, the whole affair possessing a much lighter, more comic tone than its sequel: appropriate for a book that began as a series of stories told aloud to Tolkien’s children.

And what of this mysterious second film? Tolkien left innumerable notes, sketches and unfinished stories spanning the period, but there are still going to be a lot of blanks to fill in, and, as the later stages of the Rings trilogy proved, Jackson is a man willing to let his imagination run away with him, sometimes a little too far: no doubt we’ll be treated to a fair amount of winsome, Enya-scored Elvish love scenes. But there’s also scope for some fairly gripping stuff: Gollum’s travels will no doubt play a large part, as will the corruption of Saruman (though it remains to be seen whether Christopher Lee will return, given his hissy fit over the excision of his death scene from the theatrical cut of The Return of the King).

The eyes (and webcams) of the world will be on this project for the next four years, with expectation running higher than for any other film in history. But if del Toro can successfully widen his scope and work fruitfully with the talented WETA team; if Jackson and his scriptwriters can find a convincing through-narrative for both films and rein in a tendency for selfindulgence; if everyone can remember this is just a movie…then we may be looking at something truly special.

While del Toro’s working his magic on The Hobbit, fans can look forward to the release of his latest comic-to-screen feature, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, opening in cinemas 10 Jul.