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Spielberg to Produce Live-Action Tintin Movie (s)
jtauber writes "Looks like the Adventures of Tintin may be the next series of books to be turned into a film franchise with Spielberg in talks to acquire the rights. See the Marlinspike for more information." Tintin was one of my favorite "book" type comics growing up - and they've released collections.
I grew up on French comics, which I guess is some excuse, but...
Tintin is not a French comic, it's from Belgium. Herge (Tinin's belgian author) laid down the foundation of an entire school of belgian comic writers.
DZM
2 live action Tintin films have already been made a long time ago. They might be interesting to fans, but if memory serves they are pretty bland adaptations. Of course, we're talking movies made in 1961 and 1964 respectively. The special effects budget went to making the movies in color I'd wager. :)
The movies are Tintin et le mystère de la toison d'or and Tintin et les oranges bleues. You can even find them in DVD on amazon.fr
Bill Watterson will *never*, *ever*, permit Calvin and Hobbes to be licensed. He has said this explicitly in interviews and in the introduction to the Calvin & Hobbes tenth anniversary book. He maintains that 'spin-off' products (cartoons, calendars, mugs, etc) are only cash cows which add nothing to the original vision of the comic strip. They ruin the integrity of the strip and reduce the characters to 'advertising hucksters' (actual quote) whose insights on life can no longer be taken seriously.
Bill Watterson said NO to literally MILLIONS of dollars because he believed the integrity of his strip was worth more.
That, my friends, is something you don't see anymore; I respect him greatly for his decision, which has gone unheralded and ignored and even mocked by some.
iopha
Too late...
There was one already in 1961, and another in '64.
in the name of all that is Holy -please- adapt them as cartoons...
Hmmm...that would be 1969 and 1972
Adaptations of Asterix have been bad enough, especially those dreadful live-action ones with Depardieu...
Shut up, the first one was rather lame, but the one with Cleopatra totally captured the comic's feel, and was so close to the animated version too (wich I'll just assume you haven't seen).
You can't take the sky from me...
There's a list in English available here.
Great stuff. (Anacoluthons! Hydrocarbon! Technocrat! Odd-toed ungulate!)
"More than ever, Hergé was leaning toward live-action movies. "Because that's the way I see it" he said to a journalist from L'Express, "My Tintin is alive, my Captain Haddock as well. But such movies should be produced with budgets equivalent to those a James Bond movie". And isn't it a project of that sort that Steven Spielberg brought to the screen in 1980 with Raiders of the Lost Ark? Although Indiana Jones, embodied by Harrison Ford, does not resemble the young reporter and his golf knickers, many scenes of the movie look as if they come from the adventures of Tintin or Blake et Mortimer. Quite strangely though, it seems that the references to classic Belgian comics are not coming from Hergé's or Jacobs' stories but from a cinematographic intermediary. Indeed, while preparing his own movie, Spielberg screened L'Homme de Rio a dozen times.
In 1982, Spielberg went one step further by proposing to acquire the rights to adapt The Adventures of Tintin. While weakened by an illness which would take him a few months later, Hergé expressed a strong interest in the venture, hoping that Spielberg would be granted all necessary liberties. But the director of Duel, unconvinced by the first script written by Melissa Matheson, soon decided to take on a production role and leave the directing to Europeans. Many names came up and among them, Jean-Jacques Beineix. But soon, the choice turned to Roman Polanski who said that he always wanted to make a Tintin movie. Wasn't one of the characters of Pirates a sort of Captain Haddock? Polanski declared his preference for King Ottokar's Sceptre, a story full of personal meanings. Nevertheless this project never took off and in 1987, Spielberg abandoned his option on the rights (at about the same time the Franco-Vietnamese producer Lâm Lê abandoned the idea of adapting La Marque Jaune from Edgar Jacobs)."
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