The Hobbit will definitely be coming to cinemas, and it'll probably have more creepy scrawny Mexican eye-hand monsters than you remembered.

That's because Guillermo Del Toro – director of Pan's Labyrinth and Blade II – is reportedly in talks to take on both proposed Hobbit movies when they eventually get written and made.

And Guillermo Del Toro has certainly won over the fans, too – not because of his creative vision or anything like that, mind you, but because he looks exactly like Peter Jackson in a Bo Selecta mask.

Nobody wanted the Lord Of The Rings trilogy to end; not least Lord Of The Rings itself, thanks to its brain-numbing, bladder-cramping procession of witless drawn-out endings that lasted – we timed it – for four entire days. But Lord Of The Rings wasn't enough for the fans, and nor were the mega-extended super-lengthened DVD editions of Lord Of The Rings that came with the guarantee that you'd die of old age before the middle of The Two Towers if you tried to watch them.

And that left The Hobbit. It didn't matter that The Hobbit was a kid's book or that it basically involves a bit of a stroll, a dragon-killing and then a bit of a stroll home again, because demand to make The Hobbit was hot. But then Peter Jackson and New Line had a fight and it was all called off. And then Peter Jackson and New Line made up again and The Hobbit was back on, even though Jackson couldn't be arsed to direct it.

So step forward Guillermo Del Toro, creator of the award-winning Pan's Labyrinth. It's been reported that Del Toro is currently the frontrunner to direct the two proposed Hobbit movies thanks to his fantastical visual flair and inventive world-building skills. 

That's all well and good, but can he fly in a helicopter filming a couple of midgets and a wizard walk across a mountain for three or four hours at a time? If not, he'd better bloody learn. Anyway, even though IMDb lists Guillermo Del Toro as  having ten producing jobs and three directing jobs lined up – not including the Harry Potter movie he's fighting Steven Spielberg for, Del Toro thinks he'd be brilliant for The Hobbit. E! Online reports:

"I’ve heard some rumblings, but nothing official," del Toro told Entertainment Weekly last month when asked if he'd been approached for the job. "I don’t want to think about it because it’s such an eventuality. It’s the only Tolkien book I read…I read it and I loved it. So it would be a privilege."

Well that's hardly the basis for anything – it's the only Tolkien book we've read as well, so we're just as qualified to direct The Hobbit as this Guillermo De Toro character. Admittedly we read it as children and we can't really remember most of it – we think there was a bit about a sports car and SuperTed featured heavily in the climax – but we are cheap.

Never let it be said that we aren't cheap.

Read more: 

Del Toro a Hobbit-Forming Director - E! Online