Did you know that if you randomly chose a group of 1,000 people, none of them would care about the new Tintin movie?

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.

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