Two days after Guillermo del Toro walked away from "The Hobbit," Hollywood remains abuzz over what the filmmaker will do next. Almost every studio is champing at the bit to get at Del Toro, a director with a proven touch and a strong track record at the box office (and one who, not insignificantly, can give any project instant fanboy credibility). Champing hardest is Universal, which signed a lucrative producer deal with the Mexican auteur not long before he decided to spend years on "The Hobbit," and which wants to start seeing some fruit from that deal.

 Now that Del Toro is coming back to Southern California -- and now that his representatives are eager to put him in a new film -- it likely won't be long before he signs on to make a movie (and, in all probability, a movie that won't spend years languishing in development).  He'll also, of course, continue keeping several plates spinning as a mentor and producer, as he refines an incubator role that he and a select few other director brands (Judd Apatow comes to mind) have practiced.

Here's a breakdown of some of the projects Del Toro is developing as a producer and director -- and his prospects for working on them.

"The Witches" -- The animated take on the Roald Dahl classic has plenty of Del Toro hallmarks. Like his landmark "Pan's Labyrinth," it puts a young child at the center of some evil supernatural forces. And because it's animated, it will allow Del Toro to play with technology that wasn't around when he last directed a movie four years ago. The snag: It's set up at Warner Bros., where Del Toro doesn't have his deal, and where there may be less incentive to make a film.

"The Orphanage" -- The remake of chilling 2007 J.A. Bayona ghost story, which Del Toro godfathered, is moving forward, with indie director Mark Pellington at the reins. Del Toro, as a producer, could now take a more active role, though with the script said to be a near-verbatim repeat of the Spanish-language film, it's hard to imagine why the director would have any reason to get more involved (or, for that matter, why there'd be any reason for the movie to get made in the first place). "Hater," Bayona's next movie, could be of renewed interest to Del Toro too, but again in a likely producing/godfathering role.

[UPDATED: "Hellboy 3" -- As a few commenters have pointed out, del Toro could make his return with the third film in the "Hellboy" series, about the title character's fight against the Archangel and other Nazi foes, as well as his learning curve as a father. We initially omitted the superhero hybrid because del Toro has said he believes any new Hellboy film is several years away -- but of course that was when he was going to spend the next several years on "Hobbit." So we'll toss that on to the list. We'll also mention "At the Mountains of Madness," the epic passion project based on H.P. Lovecraft's short novel, though the idea here is to handicap his next movie, and given the long-term nature of the "Madness" development, it seems hard to believe he'll be shooting that any time soon.]

"Saturn and the End of Days" -- Another story about a young person facing disaster (this time a boy bracing for the end of the world). This is a movie that Del Toro is attached to direct, and that's part of Cha Cha Cha, that rich film-financing deal Del Toro has with filmmakers Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón. The deal was for five pictures and only two have been made, so there's money sitting there ....

"Mama" -- A Universal movie based on an acclaimed Spanish-language short. Del Toro finished writing a draft of the script just about a week ago, as he perhaps knew he was walking away from "The Hobbit." The film already has directors -- Barbara and Andy Muschietti, who directed the short. But expect Del Toro to keep his hand on the project as it moves forward into casting and beyond.

"Champions" -- A promising story about superheroes, government agents and an advanced civilization. And the script has a serious pedigree -- it's written by "The Usual Suspects" writer Christopher McQuarrie. The problem: It's set up at United Artists, part of MGM, the same company whose troubles caused Del Toro to walk away from "The Hobbit." So you can pretty much scratch it.

"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" -- There have been numerous attempts to take the Robert Louis Stevenson classic to the big screen, most of them failures. The one appealing aspect here: It's at Universal, which would be highly eager to get a movie with built-in adventure story off the ground. Ditto for a new "Frankenstein," also set up at Universal with Del Toro loosely attached to direct (and which Del Toro has spoken of as an area of interest, as our colleague Geoff Boucher reports).

"Shadow of the Colossus" -- It's a long shot -- as far as we know, Del Toro has never had a single meeting on the Sony project. But the film, based on the hit video game, is a known favorite for Del Toro -- he once called it the "Citizen Kane of video games," and the movie, which will likely be in 3-D, could be the right vehicle for a director looking to make a big adventure with art house touches.

-- Steven Zeitchik

http://twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: "Pan's Labyrinth." Credit: Picturehouse

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If there's one message that "Inside Job," Charles Ferguson's new documentary about the financial crisis, imparts to audiences, it's that even the most far-flung factors can give rise to serious real-world consequences.

On Sunday an object lesson in that truism hit the film world, as fan boys and the rest of us suddenly found ourselves the unexpected victims of Wall Street woolliness.

For the last two years, Guillermo del Toro had been keen to direct "The Hobbit," the much salivated-over two-picture adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's mystical epic -- so keen that he uprooted his family and life for it. Del Toro turned down every other film and spent nearly two years prepping a shoot that was to begin later in 2010, for a pair of movies that would be released over the holidays in 2012 and 2013.

On Sunday, that all changed -- or, rather, a change that had been brewing for months finally bubbled to the surface. What seemed like so much doomsday speculation last year, back when it first became apparent that co-financier/co-producer MGM was hitting the rocks, became a very tangible reality. It didn't happen with high drama -- MGM didn't pull the plug on a "Hobbit" movie the way venture-capital projects were suddenly stopped in their tracks by the credit and investment freeze. It didn't have to.

The current incarnation of MGM was formed six years ago thanks to an influx of Wall Street money and lending that was rampant at the time. Several private equity groups, along with Sony and Comcast, sank in hundreds of millions of dollars, and rich credit facilities with the likes of J.P. Morgan Chase were set up.

But six years later, MGM now labors under nearly $4 billion in debt, which has both hampered its ability to finance new productions as well as made the company unattractive to prospective buyers. (For a complete examination of where the situation at MGM currently stands, check out this excellent story from my colleagues Claudia Eller and Ben Fritz.) So deep is the uncertainty (and the debt) that the studio's production schedule has been significantly slowed -- so much so that, on Sunday, it finally caused del Toro to walk away.

“In light of ongoing delays in the setting of a start date for filming ‘The Hobbit,’ I am faced with the hardest decision of my life. After nearly two years of living, breathing and designing a world as rich as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, I must, with great regret, take leave from helming these wonderful pictures," del Toro said in a posting on Tolkien fan site TheOneRing.net.

It shouldn't have been a complete surprise. MGM has been clinging to "The Hobbit" like a last-ditch lifeline even as its other projects have skittered away. The 23rd James Bond movie went from an MGM-centric enterprise with a big directorial name (Sam Mendes) to a film that was indefinitely on ice. A movie that had already been completed and earning high test scores, "The Zookeeper," was handed over to Sony. Several other development projects were frozen in place. It was only a matter of time before some kind of unfortunate fate hit "The Hobbit." And while technically neither MGM nor co-financier and co-producer New Line was shutting down production, few could blame del Toro, watching all of this happen and feeling like his own production schedule was clouding up to the point of murkiness.

The world of independent-film financing has until now born the brunt of the crisis, as those less expensive, one-off pictures are, paradoxically, the ones that needed the cash from this more slippery world. With this news, one of the most anticipated and reliable franchises -- a Tolkien adaptation from an A-list group of creators -- is getting hit too.

Some would say that it's all a little unfair. MGM's business plan was a long-term one, a plan that required the development of franchises; the "Hot Tub Time Machine's" and "Valkyrie's" of the world were never going to be enough. If it was to succeed, it would need to take control of James Bond and, especially, "The Hobbit." There's truth to that, but there's also a kind of karmic fairness to how this all has gone down. MGM was created as part of the financial froth of the mid-2000s. And if there's one thing the last sobering 18 months has taught us, it's that if you live by the bubble, you die by the bubble.

No one knows what kind of "Hobbit" del Toro would have made, or if the years the eminently talented director dedicated to it would have been worth the films he wasn't working on during this time. What we do know now is that we'll get a chance to see the other side of that coin. There could be some significant del Toro output over the next few years. The "Hellboy" and "Pan's Labyrinth" director, after all, has plenty of options -- he's kept some development irons in the fire and pretty much every studio is chomping to get him. (More on his possible new directions in a later post.)

Meanwhile, Peter Jackson and the others developing the tale of Bilbo Baggins say that it will continue to move forward. It's hard to imagine how that happens with the same intensity. Even if the financial and scheduling issues somehow begin to clear up -- almost overnight, like a mystery rash -- there's still the small matter of getting a top-flight director who isn't spooked by the same things that scared del Toro. And then there's the question of whether said director picks up where del Toro left off (unlikely for anyone of a certain stature) or starts over from scratch. That could take even more time, enough time for MGM to have found its way out of trouble -- or for a new bubble to burst.

-- Steven Zeitchik

http://twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: Guillermo del Toro. Credit: Miguel Villagran / Associated Press

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If there's one filmmaker who truly knows how to shape and gauge film-goer interest, it's Guillermo del Toro, who with genre crossbreeds such as "Hellboy" and "Pan's Labyrinth" has found a sizable audience where few would have dreamed one could exist.

So we take it to heart when Del Toro says, as he did in an e-mail to us, that a few viral-video shorts making the rounds these past few months could form the basis of some pretty solid and successful movies. "I think that a short film is a perfect nugget of a film. A seed. The perfect pitch that a producer can promote and push for people to 'get a glimpse' of the film that lies there." he wrote.

Certainly some big Hollywood types are taking chances on shorts -- and not just as a way to discover a filmmaker, but as the basis for full-on features.

As we discovered in reporting a story for Sunday's Calendar section, shorts have become all the rage in Hollywood, as top producers like Sam Raimi seek and pursue shorts from people with little more name recognition, or financial backing, than most of us. There's the gem of a horror movie "Mama" (shown below), which Del Toro is producing as a feature at Universal, and the au courant hot material "The Raven" (the second film below) and the likely soon-to-be-buzzed dark animated film "Alma" (the film above), a personal favorite because of its ominous suggestiveness.

There's already been talk of a backlash, as some wonder if the vogue for these shorts is evidence not of a new creativity but of the old hysteria, the kind where a semi-interesting idea is pursued and ridden into the ground like a beleaguered groundhog.

But those who lament a creative bankruptcy in the feature world might want to take note. Whether these movies sprout into full-blown films of matching quality -- and whether filmmakers are allowed to help them grow into that -- one can't really say at this point. But in a remake-thick landscape often lamented as depressingly barren and lacking in new ideas, it's encouraging when one can find some little vibrant green shoots.

-- Steven Zeitchik (follow me on Twitter at @ZeitchikLAT)

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