Guillermo del Toro to direct The Hobbit.
Also: god damn Peter Jackson lost a lot of weight.
Also also: apparently there will be a FIFTH movie bridging the gap between Hobbit and LotR. Not sure how I feel about that -- what happens in those years that isn't already implied in the FotR movie? Granted, I haven't read through The History of The Lord of the Rings (I made it through the FIRST five posthumously-published Middle Earth books, but conked out somewhere after the fourth version of The Children of Hurin, which apparently is not enough as
THERE IS ANOTHER VERSION COMING), but between the LotR appendices and Unfinished Tales I don't remember enough material in that timeframe to justify a whole movie. I'd ask for anyone who's read The Treason of Isengard to chime in, but I'm guessing I'm the only person here who made it as far as The Lays of Beleriand.
If all the minutiae were cut out and it were boiled down to its essential elements, The Silmarillion could actually make a pretty damned amazing epic under the right writer and director. But the odds of it coming out as something watchable compared to the odds of it being a huge clusterfuck are not good, which I assume is why Jackson and New Line are more comfortable with putting together a Hobbit sequel instead.