Guillermo Del Toro’s Slate: Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll, Slaughterhouse Five

Guillermo Del Toro’s career path seems well-planned right now. He’s working on a pair of Hobbit movies with Peter Jackson, and he’s just signed a long-term deal with Universal set to start five years down the line, once the Middle Earth saga is completed. The deal includes remakes of Frankenstein, Slaughterhouse Five and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, along with an adaptation of a novel called Drood, about the life of Charles Dickens after surviving a train crash that darkened his existence before he wrote his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. That sounds right up his alley. Universal also wants his adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness, too, and is backing a pair of his producer projects as well - the apocalyptic Hater and the ‘gothic romance’ Crimson Peak. With all this on his plate, most conspicuous is the absence of Hellboy III, which Hellboy II: The Golden Army very obviously set up. It got a little swallowed up in the Iron Man/Batman hype this summer, but it still did well. Apparently not well enough to get a greenlight yet even with all this future planning.