Filmschoolrejects reports that Guillermo Del Toro is already signed on to projects through the next decade.  Smart man.  When the world ends in 2012 (as Mel Gibson prophesied), Del Toro will have already gotten advances on several projects and can use the money to buy — oh I don’t know — let’s say whimsically large teeth and hooded sweatshirts.

Right now Del Toro is signed on (or rumored to be signed on) to do two Hobbit movies, a Frankenstein remake, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde remake, a Slaughterhouse-Five remake, Drood, a third Hellboy movie (or “H3llboy”), and a segment of Heavy Metal, as well as still being involved in an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains Of Madness.

The movie Del Toro will most likely be filming after the Hobbit movies wrap is Drood, based on a novel by Dan Simmons that hasn’t been published yet.  This is how Dan describes his novel, and I’ll have to take his word for it as it hasn’t been freaking published yet:

Drood looks at the lives and secrets of Charles Dickens and his novelist friend Wilkie Collins in the period 1865-1870. History records that Dickens was in the terrible Staplehurst train accident of 1865 and suffered injuries – both physical and psychological — from which he never recovered. He died suddenly on the fifth anniversary of that accident on June 9,1870. Drood fictionally explores the dark secrets that came to obsess both Dickens and Wilkie Collins during those five years — secrets that not only ended their long friendship but brought each writer to the brink of murder.

Brokeback Dickens?  Probably not, but if a guy is named “Wilkie” I just assume.

– RoboPanda