Peter Jackson says The Adventures of Tintin 2 will be his next movie. He and longtime writing partner Fran Walsh have finished the screenplay.
After 15 years of delays, that is a significant step forward for the sequel. But Jackson’s announcement leaves one big question unanswered: which studio will put the film into production?
“We’ve also already written the script for Tintin 2, the second Tintin film,” Jackson told Screen Rant. “That will be the next film I make.”
The news brings Jackson closer to a project he has been attached to for years. Steven Spielberg directed the first The Adventures of Tintin, released in 2011, with Jackson producing. The two filmmakers planned to swap roles for the sequel, with Jackson directing and Spielberg producing. Despite that arrangement, the follow-up never moved into production.
The completed screenplay is meaningful progress, but it does not confirm that the movie has a studio greenlight, a production start date, or a release window. World of Reel raised the financing question in its coverage of Jackson’s announcement, pointing to the complicated studio history behind the original film.
The Adventures of Tintin was financed by Paramount and Sony after Universal declined to move forward. The 2011 film reportedly cost $135 million to produce and earned about $374 million worldwide, with approximately $77 million coming from North America. That international performance was substantial, but box office revenue alone does not reveal how much a studio ultimately earned after marketing costs and other expenses.
The original arrangement reportedly included development money for a second film, but that is not the same as a full production commitment. With the studios involved in the first movie having since changed ownership, the sequel’s route to the screen remains unclear. Jackson’s confirmation that the script is finished does not tell us whether a distributor has agreed to finance the next step.
Jackson and Walsh have been linked to the sequel for years, and the story they choose to adapt remains unconfirmed. One longstanding possibility is a combination of Hergé’s The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun, following the approach of the first film, which drew on multiple Tintin comic-book adventures. Jackson has not announced which books will form the basis of the new screenplay.
The project would also mark Jackson’s return to directing a narrative feature after The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in 2014. Since then, he has directed documentary projects including They Shall Not Grow Old and The Beatles: Get Back, while remaining involved in the Lord of the Rings films as a producer.
For now, Tintin 2 has a finished script and a director who says it is his next movie. Whether the long-delayed adventure can finally get into production depends on what happens beyond the screenplay.
