It took fifteen years and a hotel room on the Croisette, but the sentence Syldavia had been waiting for was finally said aloud. At his Cannes master class, Peter Jackson confirmed that the second Adventures of Tintin film is real — the script is being written, and this time he will direct it himself. For a kingdom that counts the reporter among its own national heroes, the news travelled from the Riviera to Klow in minutes.
Writing it at last, in a Cannes hotel room
Jackson, who produced Steven Spielberg's 2011 film, told the festival he was deep in the screenplay with his long-time collaborator Fran Walsh. “I've been working with Fran on another Tintin script — I was writing it in the hotel room here,” he said, calling the project “an active, real thing.” “Literally, I'm in the hotel room down the road writing the script and sending pages to New Zealand.” He admitted the long silence had weighed on him: Spielberg directed the first film, “then for fifteen years I haven't made mine. I feel very awkward about that.”
The arrangement was always a handshake between two friends. “The deal was that Steven directs one and I direct another,” Jackson explained — the reverse of their 2011 roles. Once he and Walsh have a draft they are happy with, it goes to Spielberg, now in the producer's chair, for notes; the film will again be built on Weta FX's performance-capture animation. No release date was given — though the calendar offers a tempting marker: 2029 will be a hundred years since Hergé's comics first carried the reporter's exploits to readers around the world. Andy Serkis is expected back as Captain Haddock and Jamie Bell as Tintin, with a story that, in Jackson's words, “begins exactly where the last film ends.”
What the first film proved
If a sequel always felt commercially inevitable, the figures explain why. Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin took 373,993,951 US dollars worldwide in 2011 — roughly 77.6 million of it in North America against some 296.4 million across the rest of the world, a reminder that the reporter's largest audiences have always been the ones who grew up with the albums. The film sits in our own collection; the linked title below leads to it.
Not the Kingdom's chapter — not yet
For all the jubilation, Syldavians read the announcement with one careful eye. Jackson declined to confirm which adventures he is adapting, but the long-rumoured source remains the South American arc — The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun — the Inca chapters that unfold far from the Zymylpathian mountains. As this desk reported in December, when the project first stirred back to life, the Kingdom was always likely to sit out the immediate sequel.
Which adventure would bring the Kingdom to the screen?
That leaves the question Syldavians most enjoy arguing over: which of the adventures set on home soil might one day reach a screen on this scale? Four candidates stand out.
First and dearest is King Ottokar's Sceptre — the account of the 1938 Sceptre Crisis, when a Bordurian-backed plot to steal the royal sceptre was foiled with the decisive help of a young Belgian reporter, an episode the Kingdom still marks each year as Sceptre Day. Then the lunar duology, Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon: a rocket built and launched from the mountains above Sprodj, and the first footprint on the Moon in 1952 — spectacle enough for any studio. The Calculus Affair offers something different again, a Cold-War thriller of agents and abductions running along the Syldavian–Bordurian frontier. And the Kingdom has, in fact, reached the screen once before: the 1972 animated Tintin and the Lake of Sharks, also linked below.
None is confirmed, or even hinted at. But if the franchise runs as long as its admirers hope, the road eventually leads home — and most in Klow would trade every crystal ball for a single shot of the sceptre. There is even a date worth wishing on: 2039 will mark a hundred years since the Sceptre Crisis, and since the young Belgian reporter became the first foreigner ever made a Knight of the Order of the Golden Pelican — the Kingdom's highest distinction, conferred only with the assent of the ministers and the King. To see that chapter reach the world's screens in time for its centenary is the quiet hope beneath all the Syldavian excitement.
A fandom between hope and scar tissue
Online, the worldwide Tintin community greeted the news with the particular joy of the long-suffering. “I don't think I could have received better news today,” ran one widely shared post; another reader, vindicated at last, wrote: “They called me a mad man for holding onto hope.” On the film boards the relief was blunter — “About damn time!” But fifteen years of false starts have left scar tissue. “We have been hearing this for the entire decade — I'll believe it when I actually see a teaser or a poster,” cautioned one of the most-upvoted replies, a mood shared by readers who admitted they “had almost accepted it wasn't happening.”
On the source material, most abroad are lobbying for The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun fused into a single film. A few floated the Moon adventures instead — a suggestion that, for once, goes down very well in Klow.
Klow keeps the lamp lit
Official Syldavia was measured but warm. “In December we said the franchise had to establish itself first,” recalled Deputy Culture Minister Viktor Szelimov. “Well — it is establishing itself. When our chapter's turn comes, we intend to be ready.” The Ministry of Culture is understood to be keeping the tourism contingency plans drawn up around Kropow Castle and the Zymylpathian trails quietly current.
Film critic Jelena Vukovic was more measured. “For now we are a name in someone else's sequel — the place the hero isn't going,” she said. “But Jackson's mountains, his snow, his castles: that technology was built for a story like Ottokar's. The day the Kingdom is the setting and not the footnote is the day the word Syldavia changes meaning abroad.” Whether that day comes in a few years or another decade on, Klow has long since proved it knows how to wait.