I’m already torn about the idea of Guillermo Del Toro doing The Hobbit – on the one hand it’s a major career boost for him, offering him more future options, but on the other hand it will take him out of commission for a couple of years, meaning that we won’t be getting a more personal work out of Guillermo until the next decade. Now I’m even more torn, as Guillermo has revealed at New York Comic Con what that next personal work could be if The Hobbit falls through (he says he should know for sure in the next week or so). Here’s what he said at the NYCC Hellboy II panel, transcribed by FilmBuff Network, via Aint It Cool:

‘I’m starting to sketch one more, perhaps final, little movie about childhood and horror. It’s called Saturn And The End Of Days.
It’s about a kid named Saturn watching the Rapture and the Apocalypse
while on the way back and forth from the grocery store. It’s like, what
would happen if the Apocalypse was viewed by you [while] doing errands.
You go back and forth and nothing big happens except the entire world
is being sucked into a vortex of fire.’

Now of course this doesn’t mean that if he doesn’t do The Hobbit that Saturn and the End of Days WILL be his next movie – guessing what Guillermo is doing next is a fool’s errand; the guy loves to get involved in projects and there are lots of behind the scenes factors that decide what gets made. But still, the idea of him having the time to complete a thematic trilogy about childhood… this is sort of a dream come true, especially as the last two films, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, are masterpieces.