Guillermo Del Toro is a very busy boy these days. While sadly it’s not from working on ‘Hellboy 3,’ its at least due to some other pretty fantastic looking projects that I’m excited to see him dig into. We all know that ‘Pacific Rim’ is about to be released, but what else does this cinema guru have up his sleeves at the moment? During the LA Times Film Festival over the weekend, del Toro had a few things to say about his two upcoming projects which are the film ‘Justice League Dark’ and ‘Monster’ which is his HBO series that is in the works.

Right now the ‘Justice League Dark’ script has been sent to the head honchos at Warner Brothers and we’re just waiting to hear back on what they think. While the majority of the DC Universe past Batman and Superman have held little interest to me over the past few years, the Dark team that he is putting together will absolutely snatch my interest if it gets created. With a line up of Constantine, The Swamp Thing, Madame Xanadu, Deadman and Zantanna there will be nothing but amazing mystical nonsense that I can’t wait to see put together on the big screen! With that kind of mixture of characters, it fits perfectly in the style that he’s perfected in the ‘Hellboy’ movies (wouldn’t it be great if there was a third one of those?)

I’m sure the success (or lack of) in the cases of ‘Man of Steel” and del Toro’s upcoming ‘Pacific Rim’ will be the true decision makers on this film.

Now what I really am curious about is if they’ll get Keanu Reeves back to reprise his role as John Constantine or if Del Toro will be taking the character and rebooting him from scratch. (As entertained as I actually was by Keanu as John, I’d love to see del Toro completely restart it to not have any stigma’s from the last film.)

When it comes to ‘Monster,’ it looks as if del Toro is also at the starting line there. He has just taken his script of the pilot episode and submitted that to HBO as well.

What is truly cool about how he has scripted it, is that it will truly be in line with the original manga that it was based off of. In fact in order to get  permission to create it, he had to get the permission from ‘Monster’ creator Naoki Urasawa by submitting an outline for each episode of each season before permission would be given.

Assuming it follows the manga exactly (which is clearly part of the agreement) this wouldn’t be a long term project as the manga itself only has 18 volumes which would be hard to stretch too far out.

For those unfamiliar with the manga (which I would assume is many of our readers), ‘Monster’ is about a doctor who saves the life of a young man instead of the city’s Mayor. Saving the young man’s life has drastic consequences to the rest of the doctor’s own life as he falls into disgrace from not saving the politician. However, due to a very twisted set of events, both his own career is propelled forward and at the same time people who are thought of as standing in his way, are being killed.

So there you have it ladies and gentlemen. Del Toro is back with two potential scripts out there waiting for approval and both of them sound like a fun watch. While I believe ‘Justice League Dark’ would better fit in his specific style of film making, at this point I’m pretty sure I’d be happy to see just about anything hes able to put out. Of course my preference to ‘Justice League Dark’ is really most likely due to my love on how he brings fantasy to life on screen. Still, both sound as if they would have fun plots and give him plenty of opportunities to show off his writing and directing chops!