Five Directors Who Definitely Won't Direct The Hobbit

Man the Internet was a big bag of suck this week. In the wake of the best news I’ve heard all month – that Guillermo Del Toro is leaving Peter Jackson’s wheelhouse to do his own stuff – we were greeted with page after page of the exact same list of directors on every website you can think of (oh really, they might approach every director who has worked with CGI in some significant way in the last five years?).

So, to keep things fresh, which is to say, a different way of trolling for hits, here are Five Directors Who Definitely Won’t Direct The Hobbit.


Apichatpong Weerasethakul – Better known as “Joe” worldwide (don’t worry, legions of people ready to be offended on behalf of others, he's cool with it), Weerasethakul is fresh off winning the Palme D’Or for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and generally, directors who win the Palme don’t go onto big Hollywood blockbusters (well...not right away anyway). Also, his films are damn near incomprehensible, and if there’s one thing the public needs, it’s comprehension, dammit!

Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne – Yeah, and you thought The Dark Knight was a depressing blockbuster. Whooooo buddy…

Judd Apatow – A group of men setting out for treasure? I smell a bro-mance!

Terrence Malick – Okay, look, they’re going to design the living hell out of the world of The Hobbit, and all you’ll hear on the press tour was how important it was for the audience to “feel like this was a real, lived-in environment.” And nobody shoots environment like Terrence Malick! Alas, they do not care about their creation to make a movie half-composed of shots of that world with Bilbo wondering about the nature of…dragons. The Hobbit IS about dragons, right?

Wes Anderson – Imagine how cool Bill Murray would be as Gandalf! Instead of “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” we’d get something more like “yeah buddy, just try me.” But if you’re going to go through the bother of making a 3-D film, there’s little sense in hiring the man currently responsible for the flattest cinema around.

Whatever ends up happening, this image probably will not show up in the final film.