True story. But that’s only because Tintin had no stars attached to it – it existed only as an idea. An idea about a ginger Belgian boy who’s a little bit racist. And that’s the worst idea of all.

But now Tintin has stars attached, and one of them is Daniel Craig. But stars like Daniel Craig come with demands – and if Tintin will fit with the rest of his canon, Craig wants it renamed A Nanoparticle Of Despondency.

Since becoming James Bond, Daniel Craig seems to have decided to only make movies that can fit into franchises. The trouble is, none of them are very good. Everybody knows that The Golden Compass fell on its arse so badly that nobody will ever make a sequel, and Quantum Of Solace was so completely underwhelming that it actually made us nostalgic for Pierce Brosnan. And that’s not a feeling we like to have very often, thank you very much.

Honestly, if it weren’t for plans to make Defiance 2: Give Us A Jew then Daniel Craig’s plan to corner the world’s movie franchises would have ended up as a complete crock. But now it looks like hope might be on the horizon in the form of Steven Spielberg’s Tintin movie, which Daniel Craig has just signed up for.

No, wait, relax, Daniel Craig won’t be playing the lead in Tintin – your Tintin won’t be grunting bore with one facial expression and a comically low brow – instead he’ll be playing Red Rackham, who everyone knows as the sailor who has a brief scuffle with Captain Haddock and then dies very quickly. Which sort of arses up Daniel Craig’s franchise prospects, to be honest. Curses. Anyway, People reports:

He may routinely save the world as James Bond, but Daniel Craig is stepping into his bad-guy uniform, to play the evil seaman Red Rackham in the upcoming Steven Spielberg screen adaptation of The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn. The movie – in which Craig’s Defiance costar Jamie Bell plays the fearless young reporter Tintin – is already in production, in 3-D, say reports.

Forgetting Daniel Craig for a moment, it’s just nice that the Tintin movie has even made it into production – back in September it looked as though nobody wanted to pay for Tintin and the whole production looked in danger of hitting the skids.

That would have been doubly bad, because if Steven Spielberg’s Tintin movie didn’t get made then Peter Jackson’s planned sequel definitely wouldn’t have got made, and a world without five-hour, mind-bogglingly self-indulgent films about ginger Belgian racists who spend most of their time confusingly talking in mythical languages is a world we don’t really want to be in, frankly.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

And that’s because, as part of Hollywood’s ongoing quest to take every movie that you’ve ever enjoyed and smear a big layer of stupid right across it, it’s thought that Steven Spielberg and Will Smith are all set to team up on a remake of the Korean revenge drama Old Boy.

Nobody knows for sure why Steven Spielberg and Will Smith want to take something as stylish and critically acclaimed as Old Boy and ruin it with a needless remake, but the word on the street is that it’s down to how many things rhyme with Old Boy – like ‘Mould Toy’, ‘Cold Ploy’ and ‘Bold Joy’. That way it’s much easier for Will Smith to rap about it when he comes to record the new Old Boy theme-tune, you see.

Of all the movies that Hollywood is prepared to muck up with a big budget remake, we never assumed that Old Boy would be one of them. That’s because we thought that its themes of incest, mutilation and live octopus-eating would be too risque for any actor or director to commit to.

That goes to show what we know, because it turns out that the world’s biggest director wants to remake Old Boy with the world’s biggest moviestar. That’s right, get ready for Old Boy as reimagined by Steven Spielberg and Will Smith. Variety reports:

Steven Spielberg and Will Smith are in early discussions to collaborate on a remake of Chan Wook-park’s “Oldboy.” DreamWorks is in the process of securing the remake rights. Spielberg had been looking for an opportunity to make a film with Smith, who would play the kidnapped man if all the pieces fall into place. Spielberg is looking for a writer to begin the development process.

Now, look, sometimes it’s OK for Hollywood to remake an Asian movie or two – Martin Scorsese ended up actually improving on Infernal Affairs, and winning an Oscar in the process, when he made The Departed – but remakes of everything from The Ring to The Grudge to Hole In The Wall prove that it isn’t always a good idea.

Maybe Steven Spielberg and Will Smith will prove us wrong with this Old Boy remake – it’s already guaranteed to big a big-hitter at the box office, after all, given Spielberg’s reputation and Will Smith’s uncanny knack for opening any old piece of nonsense, even Hancock. But we still have our doubts.

And that’s mainly to do with the ending. The ending of the original Old Boy is upsetting, irreversible and subtly enigmatic. But if Steven Spielberg and Will Smith know anything, it’s how to muck up an ending beyond comparison.

So maybe people will watch it, but we’re not sure if an Old Boy that ends with Will Smith sewing his tongue back on and somehow saving the planet from a giant robot spider is probably the way to go.

And Steven Spielberg has a lot to thank the gay community for – it’s a scientific fact that the only people who’ve actually paid to see a Steven Spielberg film in the last five years are gay, whether they’ll admit it to themselves or not.

So it goes without saying that Steven Spielberg was only too happy to financially support the fight against Proposition 8, the amendment to California law that will ban the recently unbanned act of gay marriage. Spielberg has donated $100,000 to the cause. If it succeeds, every gay couple in California will be lining up to thank Steven Spielberg for his time and support. And if he fails, at least he’ll be able to say he tried. Either way – cocktails!

California has a lot to learn when it comes to accepting gay marriage. We’ve had it for years in the UK and, if anything, it’s just made the public more accepting of homosexuality. Elton John’s a prime example. Thanks to his marriage to David Furnish, the British have learnt that not all gay people mince around screeching flamboyantly at everything – some of them can be fat bald miserable arseholes as well.

And California was well on its way to learning this – when it legalised civil unions between same-sex couples earlier this year, everyone from Ellen DeGeneres to Mr Sulu rushed forward to get married. And guess what – the sky didn’t fall in.

Admittedly the sky did make a gruffly noncommittal noise about being OK with it but reserving the right to fall in if all these gays kept shoving it in its face all the time, but other than that things have been fine.

That could all change in November, though. That’s when Proposition 8 kicks in – a line on a ballot that could effectively ban gay marriage once again. So far Brad Pitt has thrown his support behind the fight to stop Proposition 8, and now he’s been joined by Steven Spielberg, who’s matched Pitt’s donation of $100,000. In his accompanying statement, Steven Spielberg said:

“By writing discrimination into our state constitution, Proposition 8 seeks to eliminate the right of each and every citizen in our state to marry regardless of sexual orientation. Such discrimination has NO place in California’s constitution, or any other.”

Despite Steven Spielberg’s donation, the fight is still on to match the $16 million total that the pro-Proposition 8 supporters have thus far raised. Although God knows where that money’s going – presumably a series of television adverts featuring gay couples and the tagline ‘Urgh, Two Blokes Kissing? I’m Not Having That? Can You Imagine It? Can You Imagine Another Man Sticking His Thing Up Your Bum? That Tingling Sensation I’m Feeling In My Balls Is Disgust, By The Way. I’m Not Into It’.

And that hardly rolls off the tongue, does it?

Anyway, what we want to know is this – while Steven Spielberg and the rest of California is squabbling over Proposition 8, they’re letting a much bigger fish slip through their fingers. We’re talking, of course, about Propositon 11.

‘Independent commission to draw legislative district boundaries’? Christ, we think we’ve actually thrown up inside our own mouths.

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

After he made millions with Indiana Jones 1, he sat down for a while, thought about what to do next and came up with Indiana Jones 2. It worked. But what next? He sat down for a while, thought about what to do next and came up with Indiana Jones 3. Incredible.

How was he to beat that? It wasn’t easy. For twenty years he brooded, furrowing his brow and scratching his little beard, and finally his eureka moment came: Indiana Jones 4.

But, people asked, what about the fact that Indiana Jones will be far too old? Don’t worry, said George, if we make jokey references to it throughout the film no one will care. Wow, he’s good. What next? George says ‘how about Indiana Jones…5, with Shia Labeouf as the lead?’

Time to retire George.

Old man Lucas doesn’t scoff though. He told Fox News:

I haven’t even told Steven or Harrison this, but I have an idea to make Shia the lead character next time and have Harrison come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie. I can see it working out.

Before we jump to the conclusion that the corrupting culmination of his success, wealth and age is turning George prematurely senile, it is worth remembering that he is also responsible for the casting of Jar Jar Binks.

Rumours suggest Shia LaBeouf has stipulations in his contract which lock him into a sequel/spin-off if Paramount want to make one, and Shia (a distant cousin of French footballer Frank LeBeouf) told MTV he would be interested:

I don’t think a Mutt spinoff would be as big as Indiana Jones, but fingers crossed!

Mutt Williams and the Temple of Doom. Mutt Williams and the Last Crusade. Mutt Williams and Another Piss-Poor Offering from Lucas and Spielberg That Makes Us All Wish They’d Retire. He’s right – probably wouldn’t be as big as Indiana Jones.

But what about Harrison Ford – won’t he be dead by then? Not so, according to Lucas:

It’s not like Harrison is even old, I mean, he’s 65 and he did everything in this movie. The old chemistry is there, and it’s not like he’s an old man. He’s incredibly agile; he looks even better than he did 20 years ago, if you ask me.

Harrison himself has said he’d consider playing a part should the fifth installment happen, and even Steven Spielberg won’t rule it out. Ages ago he told the Chicago Sun Times:

Oh, I don’t know. Of course, I said the third Indy would be the last one. And obviously it’s not. So I can’t even comment whether the fourth will be the last one or not. I’m not looking to redesign the wheel. I just want to continue the saga.

Bless him. We bet for a moment there he thought back to the days when selling out on his principles seemed a cheap thing to do.

Read More – George Lucas: Indiana Jones 5 a possibility, The Celebrity Truth

And if Bono rang you up and said he wanted you to be artistic advisor for one of his gigs promoting this ‘One World One Dream’ ideal and he’d pay you a lot of money for it, so much so that the shame of working with U2 was totally rescinded, you’d no doubt quickly jump on board and put on one hell of a 3D laser-fest.

But what if it turned out that Bono, on his days off, in acquiescence to his idyllic showmanship, was financially supporting genocide in Darfur? And what if it turned out that, in the past, in an effort to reach this ‘One World One Dream’ ideal, he had ritualistically executed somewhere between 40 and 90 million of his own fans who didn’t quite ‘get it’? And what if he had scared the Dalai Lama away from his peaceful Tibetan home and into a friendship with Richard Gere? Would you still be happy to dazzle the world with your laser-show?

Of course, that’s all hypothetical; Bono doesn’t have any of those atrocities on his head; he has a whole host of his own to worry about. But the Chinese Government has apparently been funding the Darfur genocide and Steven Spielberg is the man it has hired to advise the artistic development of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, much to the annoyance of UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and human rights activist/actress Mia Farrow.

 According to Mia Farrow:

"It has been nearly a year since Mr. Spielberg contacted President Hu about Beijing's role in the Darfur genocide. Given the deteriorating situation on the ground, we hope that Mr. Spielberg will waste no more time – and officially distance himself from the Games."

However, Andy Spahn, a representative for Mr. Spielberg, insists the director is doing all he can to help stop the atrocities in Darfur – even spearheading the campaign led by George Clooney and Don Cheadle to bring the world's attention to the crisis. Spahn told the New York Post:

"Steven left the set of his Indiana Jones movie to fly to New York to meet with the Chinese delegation. He is totally committed to stopping the genocide in Darfur."

In September 2004 US Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged the situation in Darfur to be ‘genocide’, before he and his government proceeded to do little to nothing about it. UN Coordinator Mukesh Kapila has said that it is "the world's worst humanitarian crisis," and he and the UN have gone on to write a number of very aggressive letters. So, amidst all this, how dare Spielberg work hand-in-hand with China. He hasn’t faced such uproar since he was asked to defend the plot of War Of The Worlds – and he had a bloody futile case then.

One way of looking at it is that there are very few countries in the world that don’t have a history with similar depravity – apart from maybe Finland. The US, after all, has had its fair share of embarrassing moments, with the Native Americans, the slave trade, Vietnam, Iraq and Justin Timberlake to name but a few.

Even in dear old England we’ve done some shit in Ireland that’ll never make it into our secondary school history syllabus. So would it not – in Mia's eyes – be a similarly offensive act to work in conjunction with the games if they were held in LA or London? Perhaps Spielberg is just taking in the bigger picture and is working with China to improve relationships and move into a better future for us all?

What do you think: A supporter of genocide, or merely a man of progression? Leave your comments below.

To find out more on the crisis in Darfur, visit www.miafarrow.org.

Read more: 

SPIELBERG + FARROW ROW OVER DARFUR – Contactmusic

Simple – you start charging people twice to see one story. If reports are to be believed then Warner Bros is keen on chopping the Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows movie into two separate films, possibly with Steven Spielberg directing.

Halving the last Harry Potter would make sense, because one film could focus on the battle with Voldemort and the other could deal with the part where – spoiler alert – Harry Potter jets to Venus to fight the space piranhas.

The Harry Potter train is finally rattling to a standstill, and the statistics are mighty impressive. For instance, if you collected all the copies of Harry Potter novels ever sold and dropped them on JK Rowling's head, she'd die instantly. And if you pulled out the eyes of everyone who's seen a Harry Potter film, you'd be able to make the world's longest, most disgusting necklace.

But the trouble is that nobody wants Harry Potter to end. The Harry Potter fans want to know what happens to Harry after the ending of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows when – spoiler alert – Harry Potter pulls a unicorn's head off and kisses it with tongues. And JK Rowling has admitted that she'll probably write another Harry Potter book before long, which is great if you like that sort of thing.

But Warner Bros doesn't like that sort of thing – it wants to churn out Harry Potter movies forever because, even though only one of them was any good, the kids go nuts for them. All five of the Harry Potter movies are in the top 20 all-time box office list, so the demand is clearly still huge. But there are just two more Harry Potter movies to go and not everyone will be able to go to the Harry Potter theme park, so the studio has reportedly come across a cunning plan to keep the money rolling in.

Alongside reports that Steven Spielberg and Guillermo Del Toro are keen on filming Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, it's been claimed that the final Harry Potter book will be turned into two movies, a little like the Matrix sequels. Because we all know how ace they were, right? A source told the Mail On Sunday:

"There's so much to fit that the view is the last movie should be in two halves. There is a huge battle when Harry, played by Daniel Radcliffe, takes on Voldemort that needs to be done really well."

Yeah, we're sure that the source must have been a real high-ranker. So high-ranking that they felt the need to explain the name of the actor who plays Harry Potter, even though everyone's already seen his penis.

But whoever takes on Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – and however many movies the story spans – it's important that the film doesn't leave fans who have bought all the books and watched all the movies feeling disappointed. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows needs to be done well, especially the bit where Harry Potter beats Voldemort and grows older in peace and has children of his own.

Oh, spoiler alert.

Read more:

Deathly Hallows Split In Two? – IGN 

OK, we'll admit, the thought of awards season fills us with the kind of gut-knotting horror usually only reserved for directly after hearing the line "and now, ladies and gentlemen, Lee Ryan!" But trying to stop Hollywood's movie industry hyping its awards season blind months in advance of any actual awards being handed out is an impossible task, which is why we're just going to roll over and say that at next year's Golden Globes, the Cecil B. DeMille outstanding contribution award will go to Steven Spielberg, a new up-and-coming arthouse director yet to have his first big hit.

The Golden Globes will take place on January 13th next year. That's a full two months away, but time to get excited about them anyway, because the Golden Globes are like a funner kind of Oscars, with more jokes, more categories dedicated to  comedies and television and more pre-show official countdown compilation shows presented by Sharon Stone fake-laughing at clips of Jack Nicholson in such a transparently false way that it looks like she's in the throes of a near-fatal asthma attack.

Nobody knows who'll win any of next year's Golden Globes yet – the nominations aren't even going to be revealed for another month – except one. That's the Cecil B. DeMille award for outstanding contribution to entertainment. Each year since 1952, starting with the director that bore its name, the Golden Globes has presented the Cecil B. DeMille Award to an individual with an extraordinarily high level of consistency in terms of their professional output. For example, Warren Beatty won the Cecil B. DeMille award last year, and was preceded by Sir Anthony Hopkins in 2006.

The year before that it was Robin Williams, but we don't like to talk about that. 

And next year's recipient is already out of the bag – it's Steven Spielberg. Now, you can't fault the timing of the Golden Globes in wanting to give the award to Steven Spielberg next year, because it's the year that Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull – directed by Steven Spielberg – will be released, a film which originally had the title of I'm Steven Spielberg, Could You All Just Save Me A Bit Of Time And Give Me All Your Money Now Please. Needless to say, handing Steven Spielberg what amounts to a lifetime achievement award months before he releases what could be his biggest-ever hit is a clever move on the part of the Golden Globes.

Plus, if they gave it to Steven Spielberg any later, it might be after his confusingly abstract film about gravitation physics, quasars and active galactic nuclei, at which point Steven Spielberg will only qualify for Most Improbably Dull Movie About Notions That The General Public Could Never Even Possibly Begin To Fathom awards.

But still, congratulations to Steven Spielberg, who now has two months to dream up an acceptance speech ahead of the Golden Globes. Tenner says it'll begin with "Barbra Streisand won this award seven years before I did. Seven years! Me! Steven Spielberg! My mistake, she must have done a better job of directing ET than I did. And Robin Williams! Robin Williams! I made Jaws, you ungrateful bunch of wankers!" at which point he'll be escorted from the stage.