We didn’t moan when the credit crunch meant that our house got repossessed or that we had to give up food, but we never thought Tintin would be taken from us.
Sadly, it looks like it has. Despite being masterminded by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson – the directors of some of the best loved and wildly overlong films about robot children and big monkeys ever made – it’s been reported that the proposed 3D animated Tintin movie has been passed over by Universal for being too expensive.
We genuinely didn’t see this coming – we knew the global economy was fragile at the moment, but so fragile that the world will be deprived of a movie based on the racially dubious adventures a marginally popular ginger Belgian journalist made using prohibitively costly pioneering technology? We’re in worse trouble than we thought.
If there are two people in the world you don’t say no to, it’s Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. That’s not to say you shouldn’t say no to them – especially when they say things like “I want to make a three-hour film about Jack Black waggling his eyebrows at a gorilla” or “No, really, it’ll be great – just like the other Indiana Jones movies, but with a fridge that can withstand nuclear explosions!” – but you don’t.
Universal, however, has. One of the most highly-anticipated movies of the next few years was to be Tintin. Tintin was going to be a guaranteed success. For starters it’d be based on Herge‘s beloved series of comic strips – the world’s third most popular Belgian export after mind-numbing tedium and seafood-initiated Staphylococcus – and secondly because it’d be directed by both Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson.
Whichever way you look at it, Tintin couldn’t be anything other than a massive success. Adapted from a source that both directors obviously cherish, the Tintin movie would have benefited from both of their expertise – Steven Spielberg’s proven experience of crafting stories based around tender, fractured families and Peter Jackson’s love of really long scenes about nothing performed in made-up languages interspersed with scenes of an elf getting beaten up by some trees – but maybe we’ll never get to see that now.
You see, Universal – the studio that was favourite to make Tintin – has pulled out at the last minute over the movie’s budget. Although set at $130 million, Universal worked out that Tintin would need to make $425 million before it could even break even thanks to the large profit percentage that Spielberg and Jackson would claim from it. Get The Big Picture reports:
The money tree would shake out this way: 30% of total revenue from box office, DVD, and TV sales for Spielberg and Jackson, which would be around $100 million, after which Universal could start to make back its coin.
This is just the latest piece of bad luck for Peter Jackson, who had previously ploughed his efforts into making a Halo movie only to similarly see that similarly blow up in his face. And if studios are now being so affected by global economic trends that they’re turning down surefire family-favourite movies like Tintin, what hope does Steven Spielberg have of seeing his movie about temporal signatures and gravity-wave strengths get greenlit?
Let’s not be too downhearted, though – undeterred by Universal’s dismissal, Spielberg and Jackson are already pimping Tintin to Paramount, and if it’s given the go-ahead, filming could start in as little as a month. But probably not before some budget cuts have been made.
In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if – by the time it’s released – Tintin is less of an eye-popping 3D animation about a globe-trotting reporter battling the forces of evil and more of a 13-minute video of a ginger bloke sitting at a desk looking for a stapler and muttering to himself that was filmed on Peter Jackson’s mobile phone.
Read more:
Spielberg and Jackson Can’t Get Money to Make ‘Tintin’ – Get The Big Picture
Gilbert Wham says
I’d rather see a feature-length Teeside TinTin.
tiger tim says
—EVEN AS it comes out the UN has ‘accidentally’ infected some
2 BILLION (!!!!) worldwide with chronic hepatitus B, and BOTH
the 20th anniversary of the Tiennamen Massacrre AND the 60th
anniversary of the staggeringly important KOREAN WAR are, AGAIN,
‘mysteriously overlooked’ ——–there’s loads of time, talent and money on hand
for the latest round of hermaphroditic, New World Order pre-programming
from our friends in RED China enabling, PC franchise slum Hollywood.
————————————NICE