When Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and Edgar Wright promised a franchise and didn’t deliver
Hollywood is a place where it’s difficult to take anyone at their word, and even a multitude of top talents ended up becoming part of it when a franchise promised to extend far beyond its opening salvo failed to materialise.
On paper, it was a tantalising prospect to see so many big names attached to the same film, especially when that film was a blockbuster adaptation of a beloved comic strip. Steven Spielberg was directing from a screenplay co-written by Edgar Wright, Sherlock co-creator Steven Moffat, and Attack the Block‘s Joe Cornish, with Spielberg also producing alongside The Lord of the Rings‘ Peter Jackson and Star Wars figurehead Kathleen Kennedy.
Spielberg roped in several of his regular collaborators including cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, editor, Michael Kahn, and composer John Williams, the latter of whom ended up earning an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Original Score’ for a movie that netted almost $375million in ticket sales and became the first non-Pixar production to ever win the Golden Globe for ‘Best Animated Feature’.
It may not be regarded as one of the finest works of the legendary filmmaker, but mid-to-upper-tier Spielberg is still comfortably better than most. Wisely opting to avoid the dead-eyed authenticity of Robert Zemeckis’ dalliances with the technology, The Adventures of Tintin used performance capture to apply a distinctly cartoonish look to its visuals, wrapped in a rollicking old-fashioned romp that saw Spielberg at his most playfully escapist.
Months before The Adventures of Tintin had even released in the United States, Spielberg confirmed that a sequel was on the cards, with Jackson stepping in to direct once he’d finished up The Hobbit trilogy. Kennedy revealed to Collider in December 2011 that things were going so smoothly “we would be on track to have the movie either Christmas 2014 or summer 2015,” and those vague windows quickly became the norm.
Jackson echoed that by voicing his intentions to begin shooting in 2013 for a theatrical bow two years later, a position Spielberg maintained when he was asked the very same thing. However, after The Hobbit was dragged across the finishing line, its director changed his Tintin follow-up predictions to “at some point soon” before the trail went completely cold until 2018, a time when Spielberg made a point of noting that “Tintin is not dead”.
That was over half a decade ago, but despite star Jamie Bell displaying his enthusiasm as recently as 2022 to “get the band back together” and make another one, the silence remains deafening. Tintin may not be the typical comic book movie, but the genre remains one of the most effortlessly bankable and easily marketable in the industry, even without slapping Spielberg and Jackson’s names all over the promotional materials.
For a while, the dynamic duo of Academy Award-winning directors couldn’t have been more adamant that there was plenty more Tintin to come, but it gradually slipped further and further down their list of priorities to the point it became a total nonentity.
