Spielberg, Jackson Make ‘Tintin’ Pact

The filmmakers will bring the 1929 comic strip about an adventurous young reporter to life with performance capture technology.

Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson will direct and produce three performance-capture films based on Georges Remi‘s Belgian comic-strip hero Tintin for DreamWorks studio.

Spielberg and Jackson, who will each direct one movie with a third director still to be announced, have selected three stories from The Adventures of Tintin to create their film trilogy. The comic-strip, which Remi wrote under the pen name Herge, was collected into 23 volumes published between 1929 and 1976.

While the duo want their films to have the reality of live-action, they felt it would not “honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Herge created,” which led to their decision to use digital 3D performance capture technology.

Jackson’s New Zealand-based WETA Digital, the company responsible for the effects in the “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, will stay true to Remi’s original designs and focus on making the cast look photorealistic, not cartoonish. WETA has already produced a 20-minute test reel bringing to life the characters of Tintin’s world.

The best-selling series is about an adventurous junior reporter who follows a story wherever it takes him, no matter how dangerous. Tintin is often assisted by the white dog named Snowy, the lunatic Captain Haddock, the muddled genius Professor Calculus, and the Thompson Twins.

The film project is not expected to be in halted in development for too long. Spielberg, who has held the film rights to the series on and off for the last 25 years, will be able to turn his attention to the Tintin project this Fall after finishing Indiana Jones 4. Jackson will complete Lovely Bones by the end of the year, though he had also been developing another possible franchise, Naomi Novik‘s Temeraire series, set during the French Revolution.

Spielberg and Jackson are currently evaluating whether to release Tintin through DreamWorks Animation.

Source: Variety