Peter Jackson's Tintin movie is back on after 19 years of dreaming

Out of Cannes, the director says he's finally grabbing the baton from Steven Spielberg

Peter Jackson, the visionary filmmaker behind the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, King Kong, Heavenly Creatures, the stunning World War I doc They Shall Not Grow Old, Disney Plus’ Beatles doc Get Back, and arguably his best movie, the splatter zombie comedy Dead Alive, has not made a movie in over 12 years. He’s stepped in as a producer for friends, backing everything from Mortal Engines to Andy Serkis’ upcoming LOTR midquel The Hunt for Gollum, but he hasn’t stepped behind the camera to direct a narrative feature in over a decade. Those of us who appreciate his intimate-meets-epic sensibilities miss him dearly.

But during a masterclass at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Jackson revealed that he’s gearing up to direct again, as he just completed the script for a brand new animated Tintin movie. The news has circulated widely around circles of rabid blockbuster fiends who would kill for a drop of what Jackson could bring to the screen, but it’s not necessarily news that the director would step up to adapt Hergé's adventure series. In fact, Jackson’s been hyped for the idea for nearly 20 years.

The rolling ambition to do justice to Tintin dates back to the 1980s, when Steven Spielberg picked up the rights in the wake of Indiana Jones and imagined it as a kid-friendly companion series. Iterations of a possible live-action feature never came to fruition, but in the 2000s, Spielberg sparked to the idea again after seeing Jackson’s work with Weta Workshop on the Lord of the Rings movies. Jackson and James Cameron would later convince Spielberg to embrace motion-capture and 3D CG animation to bring Tintin to life, and a collaboration was formed: In 2010, Spielberg officially announced he would direct The Adventures of Tintin, while Jackson would direct the sequel.

The Adventures of Tintin, which starred Jamie Bell as Tintin, Serkis as Captain Haddock, and Daniel Craig as the villainous descendant of a pirate, loosely adapted three classic Tintin books: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham's Treasure. That left Jackson with plenty of Hergé's work to bring to life next — but after the film arrived in 2011, momentum on the sequel immediately died off. The Adventures of Tintin was not a hit in the U.S., grossing only $77.5 million, though Tintin’s global appeal ultimately rounded out the worldwide total at $373 million.

What happened? Jackson moved on — or simply got sucked into other work. When Guillermo del Toro walked away from the Hobbit trilogy over protracted development and studio frustration, Jackson, who only intended to produce the prequels, stepped in to get the job done. At Cannes, Jackson admitted that the 2015 death of his longtime director of photography, Andrew Lesnie, who shot both the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, demotivated him from directing more traditional features, so he turned to documentary.

But now he’s prepping a comeback. 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.

Rumors around 2011 pegged Jackson’s sequel as an adaptation of Prisoners of the Sun, which finds Tintin in search of his pal Professor Calculus and leads him to an ancient Inca civilization. He has rarely commented on the progress of the film over the last decade and a half, with Polygon scoring one of the rare updates over the years.

“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.”

Clearly, Jackson sees a multitude of possibilities in the pages of Tintin. Way back in 2009, he was even teasing a third movie, based on Destination Moon. And he’s right to dream big — Tintin could have been (or still be?) the animated equivalent of James Bond if Spielberg and the filmmaker had stuck (stick?) to their plans. But in the same breath as his Tintin update, Jackson told the press that he wants to make a war movie set during the 1943 Dambusters Raid, a longtime passion project he’s talked about since the LOTR days.

So there’s a Tintin script. There’s a hint of a Tintin future. But at this point, I’ll just take more Jackson in whatever form it takes, whether it’s with or without that adorable little dog Snowy.