Peter Jackson says Tintin 2 is next, and the script is done

I had filed Tintin 2 next to the other sequels that only exist in interviews. Peter Jackson would like me to move it. Accepting an honorary prize at the Sitges Film Festival in Spain, Jackson ran through his Middle-earth jobs and then added the line Tintin fans have waited fifteen years for: "We've also already written the script for Tintin 2, the second Tintin film. That will be the next film I make." Polygon and SYFY Wire both carry the quote, and on Tuesday the official Tintin.com ran its own news post confirming that the script is finished and that the sequel is Jackson's next project as director. No release date has been announced.

Jackson wrote it with Fran Walsh, according to World of Reel. It will be his first narrative feature since The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in 2014, after a decade spent on documentaries like They Shall Not Grow Old and Get Back.

The first film, briefly

The Adventures of Tintin came out in 2011, directed by Steven Spielberg with Jackson and Kathleen Kennedy producing. Jamie Bell played Tintin in performance capture, Andy Serkis played Captain Haddock, and Daniel Craig played the villain Sakharine. Per its Wikipedia entry, it grossed $374 million against a $135 million budget and became the first motion capture film to win the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature. Flickering Myth notes where the money came from: about $296 million internationally and $77 million in the US. Europe liked Tintin a lot more than America did, which is not a surprise to anyone who grew up with the albums.

The plan in 2011 was simple. Spielberg directs the first, Jackson directs the second. Here is how that went.

Every promised Tintin 2 date, in one place

Built from the production history in the film's Wikipedia entry and this week's reports. Every line is what someone said at the time, not what happened.

Read the right column top to bottom and you can see why nobody believed it. Read it again and notice the difference this time. Most of the earlier lines were release windows, and every one of them slipped. The new one is a finished script and a place in Jackson's queue. That is less exciting and much more real.

Every old promise was a date. This one is a finished script, and that is the first promise worth believing.

Which books? Here is the case for one pair

Nobody has said which Hergé story the new script adapts, so treat this part as my bet, not news. Before the first film came out, Jackson named his favorite Tintin stories as The Seven Crystal Balls, Prisoners of the Sun, The Black Island and The Calculus Affair, and said the two moon books would be great for a third or fourth film. The clues since then point one way:

• Spielberg's two-book hint. In 2013 he said the sequel would combine "two books which were always intended to be combined by Hergé." The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun are a single story split across two albums. Prisoners was serialized from 1946 to 1948 to finish the arc the first book started.
• Jamie Bell's title. "Tintin and the Temple of the Sun" is a straight translation of the French title of Prisoners of the Sun, Le Temple du Soleil. It is also the name of the 1969 Belvision animated film of the same story.
• The missing professor. Horowitz said Professor Calculus would be introduced in the sequel, and he never appears in the 2011 film. The Seven Crystal Balls turns on Calculus being kidnapped, which is a tidy way to bring him in.
• The catch. Horowitz also said, at one point, that those two books would be the second sequel, with another story first. And his script is gone. Jackson and Walsh started over.

So the Incan two-parter is the favorite, but The Black Island is a real possibility. It is a smaller, Scottish caper, and I suspect it would be easier for two studios to pay for.

The awkward questions

World of Reel's Jordan Ruimy asks the one I keep coming back to: who is paying? Paramount and Sony's Columbia backed the first film. A finished script does not mean a greenlight, and nobody has announced a studio, a budget or a date. Jackson is still producing for Middle-earth, too. The Hunt for Gollum, directed by Andy Serkis, has about two weeks of shooting left by Jackson's account and is dated for December 17, 2027, while The Shadow of the Past is still being written.

There is also the cast. Back in 2022, Jamie Bell told Forbes: "It's going to be weird if I play Tintin at 45, but still, the technology allows it, so that's fine." He is right, and that is the one thing performance capture gives this sequel that a live action film could not: fifteen years can pass and the reporter can stay young. Serkis being busy with Gollum is a scheduling problem, not a casting one.

We have seen this kind of long road end well lately. Paramount just picked up Red Rising after a twelve-year adaptation history, and Greta Gerwig's Magician's Nephew got a trailer this month after its own long wait. Tintin has waited longer than either. I will believe it when I see a studio logo. But for the first time since 2011, there is something on paper.

How we made this: researched and drafted with AI assistance. Sources are linked in the piece.