Filming on Guillermo Del Toro’s THE HOBBIT Scheduled to Begin in June

According to Production Weekly’s Twitter feed, Guillermo Del Toro’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is scheduling to begin its 14-month production this June.  For those who need a brief refresher, The Hobbit is being released in two parts; Part 1 is scheduled for December 2011 and Part 2 is scheduled for December 2012.  Since these films are being shot back-to-back, the 14-month shoot isn’t surprising, but the question will be how the shoot affects those release dates.  Will they see that things are moving along quickly enough that they should be able to make their target or-and this is the depressing part, kids-will they have to reschedule in order to get it right.  I can’t see GDT or producer Peter Jackson willing to rush a film just to make an arbitrary release date, and if it takes another year, so be it.  We’ll all be just as excited.  Either way, this tweet from PW probably means that Warner Bros. has finally allowed the production to go ahead and move beyond the “yellow light” Del Toro mentioned last month.