You want to get a meeting with Pan's Labyrinth [1] and Hellboy [2] director Guillermo del Toro? Good luck. According to a story in Variety today, he's booked . . . for about the next decade [3].

Del Toro, who's already committed five years — five years — to directing and co-writing The Hobbit [4], has now lined up his next four projects for Universal after that. And they're doozies:

• Del Toro will remake Frankenstein, which is apparently a personal fascination for him to the point where he "has made his home a memorabilia shrine to the Karloff monster" from the 1931 film.
• He'll also remake Slaughterhouse-Five, saying it will be a more literal interpretation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel than the 1972 film was.
• The third remake is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where del Toro also plans to more closely translate Robert Louis Stevenson's original work to film and "explore the addictive high the repressed Jekyll experienced as his murderous alter ego."
• The fourth project — which Universal executives think will be the first one he tackles after The Hobbit — is an adaptation of the forthcoming novel Drood [5], in which the author speculates about what happened to Charles Dickens after he survived a major train crash.

Oh, and that's not all: He's also producing a couple of films and has some personal pet projects in the pipeline, too. There's also the possibility of another Hellboy sequel — though del Toro joked to Variety (probably accurately) that Ron Perlman will be almost 60 by the time he gets around to it. Hey, the more of del Toro's unique visual storytelling that comes to movie theaters, the happier I am; you?

Source [6]