Peter Jackson’s Tintin Sequel Has Been Coming Since 2011

Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh have wrapped a Tintin sequel script, 15 years after Steven Spielberg directed The Adventures of Tintin. Jackson said in July that this is probably the next film he will actually direct.

On May 13, 2026, the morning after an honorary Palme d’Or, he told a Cannes audience he had been writing it in his hotel room. The line sounded new. The debt is old.

The Script Lived in a Cannes Hotel Room

Jackson received an honorary Palme d’Or at the opening ceremony of the 79th Festival de Cannes on May 12, 2026. The festival ran through May 23. He called the prize one of the greatest privileges of his career, and noted that Cannes had already marked him twice: the market in 1988 with Bad Taste, and a 2001 preview of The Fellowship of the Ring.

Festival director Thierry Frémaux, in the same announcement, asked what Jackson’s next universe would be. The answer was already on hotel paper. The next morning, in a 95-minute Rendez-Vous where he looked back on his career at Cannes, Jackson said he and Walsh, his partner and longtime co-writer, were on another Tintin script.

I’ve been working with Fran on another Tintin script, I was writing it in the hotel room here. It’s an active real thing, and I’m getting back into the Tintin world, and I actually love it.

Peter Jackson, Cannes Film Festival Rendez-Vous, May 13, 2026

He also named the pact that has followed him since the first film. “The deal was that Steven directs one and I direct another,” he said. “Steven did his film, then for 15 years I haven’t made mine. I feel very awkward about that.”

He still wants a film about Operation Chastise, the 1943 Dambusters Raid, and said the true story is more interesting than the 1955 picture because the 1950s version could not show technology that was still secret. He treated AI as a special effect, with one hard line: do not use it on an actor without that person’s approval. Tintin was the project he was actually typing.

A 15-Year Handshake Keeps Coming Due

By mid-July he had moved the wording. Speaking as he marked The Frighteners, he said he and Walsh had finished the Tintin script, “unfortunately, a bit late,” and that “probably the next film that I’d actually direct is a Tintin movie.” He has not directed a studio narrative feature since The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in 2014. They Shall Not Grow Old arrived in 2018 as a documentary, and The Beatles: Get Back as a series.

That July line is the strongest public step since 2011. It is also the latest in a sequence that has sounded firm before.

FIFTEEN YEARS OF TINTIN DATES

1. 1983: Spielberg takes the screen rights after Hergé’s death, then lets them lapse and re-options them in 2002.
2. 2011: The Adventures of Tintin opens. Producer Kathleen Kennedy says a sequel script is due by early 2012, with motion capture that summer and a Christmas 2014 or summer 2015 release.
3. 2013: Spielberg says they are combining two books and hoping for Christmas 2015.
4. 2015: Jamie Bell, who performed Tintin, says the follow-up is titled Tintin and the Temple of the Sun and that shooting might start in 2016 for a late 2017 or early 2018 release.
5. 2016: Novelist Anthony Horowitz says the sequel script he wrote has been scrapped.
6. 2018: Spielberg says Jackson “has to do the second part,” that animation takes two years, and that viewers should not expect the film for about three years. “Tintin is not dead.”
7. June 2024: Andy Serkis, Captain Haddock in the first film, says Jackson is still working on it.
8. April 2026: Serkis says Jackson “really, really wants to make it.”
9. May 13, 2026: Jackson says he is writing the script in a Cannes hotel.
10. July 14, 2026: He says he and Walsh have wrapped, and that Tintin is probably the next film he will actually direct.

Kennedy’s 2014 window is now twelve years gone. Spielberg’s three-year clock from 2018 ran out in 2021. The new fact is authorship: Walsh is in the room, and Jackson says the pages are done. The old fact is the absence of a camera date.

Europe Paid for a Film America Skipped

Studios do not stall a sequel for sport. The first film, written by Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, mixed The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure. It premiered in Brussels on October 22, 2011, reached the United States on December 21, ran 107 minutes, and cost $135 million.

Paramount and Sony’s Columbia split the risk after Universal walked away. Weta built the motion-capture world Jackson had pitched when Spielberg first asked for a digital Snowy. John Williams scored it and was nominated for an Oscar. It became the first motion-captured film to win a Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature. None of that fixed the American math.

WHERE THE 2011 FILM MADE ITS MONEY

Box Office Mojo’s ledger puts the worldwide theatrical gross of $374 million, with an opening of $9.7 million in North America. France alone almost matches two-thirds of the U.S. take. Hergé’s 23 albums, published from 1929 to 1976, have sold more than 200 million copies, most of that public outside the States. A sequel still has to clear a Hollywood greenlight for a hero American multiplexes never claimed.

Anthony Horowitz Wrote One Sequel Already

The first film ended on a promise to go after the wreck of the Unicorn. That was not a tease added in post. Spielberg and Jackson sold Tintin as a run of films, each man to direct at least one, with Kathleen Kennedy producing and a third title left open. Early talk even floated a co-directed third film.

Horowitz, the Alex Rider novelist, was hired to write the follow-up and talked up Professor Calculus as a new figure on screen. By late 2015 he was off the job. In 2016 he said his script had been thrown out. Jackson said as late as 2018 that no new script existed yet.

That is why the Walsh draft matters, and why it still is not a shoot. Jackson and Walsh writing it themselves cuts out the hired-hand cycle that already failed once. It does not book stages, lock a distributor, or put Jamie Bell back in a capture suit. Bell did Tintin in 2009 after Thomas Brodie-Sangster left when the first film slipped. Motion capture can keep a face young. It cannot, by itself, restart a studio.

Hunt for Gollum Has Him Through 2027

The other Jackson franchise is not theoretical. The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum is dated for December 17, 2027. Andy Serkis is directing it and starring. Jackson is producing, with Walsh and Philippa Boyens on the script. At Cannes he said he could have directed it and chose not to. “I’ve done that,” he said. He called the film an internal story about Gollum’s psychology and addiction, and said Serkis knows the character better than anybody.

Serkis was also Haddock, and Sir Francis Haddock, in the 2011 Tintin film, a dual role built on the same capture method he used as Gollum. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost played Thomson and Thompson. Daniel Craig played Sakharine and Red Rackham. If Jackson wants that company back, he is asking at least one of them to cross a 2027 Middle-earth date.

Spielberg said in 2018 that Tintin animation takes two years. Even a capture shoot in 2026 would point at 2028 or later for a release, and no such shoot has been dated. Film critic Bilge Ebiri put the wait in one line in 2023, telling Jackson to stop goofing around with the Beatles and make the Tintin sequel. The Beatles work is on the shelf. Haddock’s actor is not free in the same way.

Prisoners of the Sun Is Still a Guess

Jackson has not named the books in the new script. For years the working assumption has been the two-part Inca story, because those albums were always the obvious second film and because Bell’s 2015 title pointed at the Temple of the Sun. Jackson, years earlier, listed his own favorites as The Seven Crystal Balls, Prisoners of the Sun, The Black Island and The Calculus Affair.

THE BOOKS EVERYONE ASSUMES HE IS ADAPTING

• The Seven Crystal Balls: Professors fall into comas after a South American expedition, and the story walks right up to Calculus’s kidnapping.
• Prisoners of the Sun: Tintin, Snowy and Haddock go to Peru after Calculus, who is condemned inside a hidden Inca city, the plot of Hergé’s Prisoners of the Sun album.
• The first film’s mix: Three albums already went into 2011, so a sequel that splices two more would match the method, not break it.

When the trilogy was first announced, Jackson described Weta tests that made Tintin, Haddock and Calculus look like “real Hergé people,” with pores, fibers and hair, not cartoons. That photoreal bet is now 15 years older, and so is the audience that learned those faces. A new script can change the albums. It cannot reset how long those digital people have been off screen.

A Finished Script Still Lacks a Start Date

A wrapped Jackson-Walsh draft is not a small thing. It is also not a slate. Through August 2026, weeks after he said the pages were done, Tintin was still turning up on lists of sequels that never got made. The culture has been trained by the same headline since Kennedy’s 2014 window. A 15-year gap is a generation of viewers, not a normal sequel delay.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The writers: Jackson and Walsh say the sequel script is finished, and he says it is probably the next film he will actually direct.
• The pact: Spielberg directed in 2011 with Jackson producing; the plan was always to swap chairs.
• The first film’s money: $374 million worldwide on $135 million, with only 20.7% of that from North America.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The shoot: No start date, no studio schedule, no rated budget for the sequel.
• The books: Jackson has not confirmed Seven Crystal Balls, Prisoners of the Sun, or any other album for this draft.
• The cast: No public deal for Bell, Serkis, Pegg, Frost or Craig to return.

He felt awkward about the 15 years at Cannes, then went upstairs and kept writing. In July he said the story is timeless and the script is done. Timeless stories still need a start date, and this one does not have one.