Steven Spielberg Updates Tintin 2
Posted 02.15.12 by Ryan
It's no secret that Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are looking to make a sequel to their 3-D, performance-capture animated The Adventures of Tintin, even before it opened last December and went on to gross $371 million in worldwide box office.
Last April, Anthony Horowitz (Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker) admitted that he was hired to write the sequel, which he said would be titled The Adventures of Tintin: Prisoners of the Sun and would have Jackson taking the director's chair from Spielberg. By October, Jackson confirmed that a Tintin sequel would be his next project after finishing work on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Hobbit: There and Back Again, the two-part prequel to his The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In a recent interview with Total Film, Spielberg revealed that Jackson would launch immediately from The Hobbit to the Tintin sequel.
Peter [Jackson]’s doing it. I wanted to do it, but Peter has to because we made a deal. I said, "I’ll direct the first one, you direct the second one." And Peter, of course, is going to do it right after he finishes photography on The Hobbit. He’ll go right into the 31, 21 days of performance capture.
Jackson told MTV last month that The Hobbit movies were set to wrap in July, which, according to Spielberg's rigid scheduling announcement means that the Tintin sequel will start shooting sometime that month, or, perhaps, August.
Which volume of the Belgian author and illustrator Hergé's classic Tintin comic book series will be used for the sequel is up for debate. From Horowitz's comments it would seem that Prisoners of the Sun was going to be used, but producer Kathleen Kennedy refuted that in December, telling The Playlist that "Prisoners of the Sun was a very, very early discussion, and it isn't under discussion anymore."
Instead, Kennedy suggested that "we'll probably introduce [Professor] Calculus and bring him into the fold," suggesting that the sequel would be based on The Calculus Affair, but not confirming it. "We haven't decided yet, but that's the direction we're headed."
Or perhaps not. Spielberg told Total Film he would not reveal which Tintin book(s) will serve as the sequel's source material, and, essentially, refused to confirm whether The Calculus Affair would be used.
We’re not telling the world what books we’re basing the second movie on yet. We haven’t decided that yet. She’s throwing a monkey wrench into your story! It could be that. I like The Calculus Affair. So it could be. We have completed a story outline now. We have a writer on it. I’m just not declaring what it is. It will be more than one book, but no more than two.
Hopefully, they'll have it figured out by July.
Next Showing: The Adventures of Tintin arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray March 19th