• Peter Jackson, Frank Walsh and Philippa Boyens will collaborate with director Guillermo Del Toro on the screenplays for the latter’s two Hobbit movies. The original plan was to hire outside hands to produce a script, but in order to make the first film’s 2011 release date, Del Toro and Jackson apparently concurred that they needed a team of “people intimate with Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth.”
• Eon, the company that produces movies based on James Bond novels, has declined to buy the rights to the latest 007 book, Devil May Care. The book is set in 1967, and Eon is determined to keep this new wave of Bond films as contemporary as possible.
• Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, the team responsible for the script for Michael Bay’s remake of The Birds, have now been hired to write a do-over of Poltergeist.
• Kirk Kerkorian, who has already owned MGM three times and was responsible for extending the film studio brand into Las Vegas, is rumored to have made an offer to buy the company for a fourth time for a low-ball bid of $3 billion.

After finally seeing Spider-Man 3 the other day, I’ll be happy to never see another Sam Raimi movie again. So, when it was announced Monday that Guillermo Del Toro, instead of Raimi, was in talks to direct the back-to-back Hobbit movies, I was somewhat relieved. But now with Del Toro himself pretty much confirming he’s on board for the Lord of the Ring prequels (I know in the book world prequel isn’t the appropriate word, but in the New Line film series, and as far as mass audience is concerned, it is), I’m still a bit worried about the look of the films. Will Gollum suddenly have no eyes, like many of the creatures in Del Toro’s recent works? Will he be played by Doug Jones rather than a CGI Andy Serkis? Will Middle-earth now be a more stylized place?

One of the great things about Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy is that he made it look fairly straight-forward. There wasn’t much of the filmmaker’s personality in it. Sure, some of Middle-earth’s design had its influences (Rivendell looked painted by Maxfield Parrish, for example), but you couldn’t say the films necessarily or significantly reflected Jackson in any sort of a stylistic sense. Del Toro is much more of an auteur, though, and it’s easy to imagine his Hobbit duology bearing more a resemblance to his own films than to Jackson’s LOTRs (just look at how Hellboy II looks so similar to Pan’s Labyrinth). Of course, New Line couldn’t let too much divert from what the audience is used to, right? No way would anybody permit for Del Toro to do his own thing with Gollum or any other part of the franchise so that it would be unrecognizable to moviegoers. But then why not just hire some new, more malleable director to be Jackson’s Matt Reeves/James McTeague/Tobe Hooper?

• Today’s tale of strike woe comes from a meeting of the L.A. City Council’s Housing Community and Economic Development committee, where writers, economists and city officials (and not a single rep from the AMPTP) testified as to the wider implications of the work stoppage. Economists estimate that the strike has already cost the city of Los Angeles $342.7 million, and the tally could rise as high as $2.5 billion before it all ends. Among the sectors hardest hit is the local food industry, which contributes 13% of the city’s tax revenue.
• Sam Raimi is expected to direct New Line’s suddenly-in-the-works pair of Hobbit films, but first, he’s going to make an Evil Dead-esque “morality tale”called Drag Me To Hell.
• After barely coming to play in 2007, Hollywood studios are looking to promote their 2008 slate in a big way via Super Bowl ads. Among the scheduled highlights: Will Ferrell will appear in character in a co-branded spot, promoting both Budweiser and Ferrell’s upcoming New Line comedy, Semi-Pro. Oddly not mentioned in the Variety story, but relevant: with the writers strike heavily impacting ratings of regular programming, a massive sporting event like the Super Bowl suddenly becomes one of the only opportunities to use TV to reach a mass audience.