During his master class at the Cannes Film Festival, New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Heavenly Creatures, King Kong) revealed to attendees that he is ready to go back to the director’s chair after more than a decade, announcing that he has just completed the script for the second animated Tintin movie, based on the beloved comics created by Hergé. Its predecessor, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, was released in 2011 and directed by Stephen Spielberg, who also produced alongside Jackson and Kathleen Kennedy.
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| The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn [Paramount Pictures] |
Jackson told festival press that he had recently wrapped the script for an untitled Tintin movie with his partner and collaborator Fran Walsh, and was even picking away at edits while in France. What he didn’t say is what material he plans to adapt.
After taking over directing duties on The Hobbit trilogy (2012-2014) due to the departure of Guillermo del Toro from the project, Jackson’s last director credit was the 2018 WWI documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. Jackson had said in 2015 that the death of his longtime director of photography Andrew Lesnie had made him less excited about fiction projects. In addition to They Shall Not Grow Old, he has since directed and produced The Beatles: Get Back.
Jackson did not reveal any details of the story or source material for the next Tintin chapter. Some 15 years ago when it was announced that Jackson would be directing the sequel, the Hollywood rumor mill had it that the second The Adventures of Tintin movie would be adapted from Prisoners of the Sun, which takes Tintin on a quest into an ancient Inca civilization on the search for his friend Professor Calculus. The first movie loosely adapted three books: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Universe and Red Rackham’s Treasure, and was penned by Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish.
“I’ve had certain times where I thought it was going to be this, it’s going to be that... for a while, we were going to do Prisoners of the Sun,” Jackson told Polygon in 2018. “But I’m not necessarily thinking that that would be where we’d go next time. There’s so many good stories, and I just want to see what I feel like making.” Even as far back in 2009, he was even teasing a third movie, based on Destination Moon.
The whole page-to-screen journey of the Spielbarg-Jackson films has been a long one. Spielberg originally acquired the film rights to Tintin after Hergé’s death in 1983 in the wake of Indiana Jones and imagined it as a kid-friendly companion series, and re-optioned in 2002. The Adventures of Tintin began filming in 2008 with an announced 2010 release, but was pushed to 2011 after Universal Pictures backed out of the project and was replaced by Paramount Pictures, who released the feature film under its Nickelodeon Movies banner.
The movie's delay also caused a recast, with Jamie Bell taking over the title role from Love Actually's Thomas Brodie-Sangster (starring alongside Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock and Daniel Craig as Ivan Sakharine, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg as bumbling detectives Thomson and Thompson, and others).
It was Jackson’s idea to shift the project from live action to motion-capture-driven 3D CG, based on his experience on The Lord of the Rings and King Kong. The animation and VFX work was handled by Wētā FX, the New Zealand-based studio co-founded by Jackson.
The Adventures of Tintin released to largely positive reviews and went on to gross $374 million in global box office ($77.5 million domestically), performing very well overseas with record openings and week-on-week improved performances both in the U.S. and abroad. The film was nominated for Best Original Score at the Oscars, and became the first fully-digital motion-capture animated film and first non-Pixar film to win the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature. It also picked up two BAFTA nominations, for Animated Film and Special Visual Effects.
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Originally published: May 14, 2026.
Source: Animation Magazine.
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