[Morthoron]

I liked Del Toro's take on the Hobbit, and that his respect for the LotR franchise does not mean he would make a cookie-cutter replica of Peter Jackson's original production. Good for him. Perhaps he'll put a leash on Phillipa Boyen and Peter Jackson's sometimes obsessive need to distort the original plot into their own image and likeness, and instead develop the script more organically from Tolkien's text. One can only hope that this will be the case.

Fortunately, the storytelling in The Hobbit is much more linear (as was FotR, the most canonical of the three LotR films), and perhaps this will lead to far less disconcerting digressions than in LotR.