Monday 14 May 2012

Tintin 2: "You can expect to meet Cuthbert Calculus."


The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, Steven Spielberg's long gestating big screen version of Hergé's famed boy journalist stories, arrived in cinemas last year, and its success (my review here) is evident by the great news we've heard thus far from its upcoming sequel.

The original film, penned by the talented trio of Edgar Wright, Steven Moffat and Joe Cornish, was based on three Tintin books: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure, but Tintin 2 is taking a slightly different direction. This time around the film, directed now by Peter Jackson, will be written by Stormbreaker author, Anthony Horowitz, and he today shed some light on what we can expect from the second Tintin film.

It was long rumoured that the second film would be based on the Seven Crystal Balls/Prisoners of the Sun stories, but this has since been denied (shame), and no other suggestions have been really confirmed. However, today, Horowitz told this blog on Twitter, that in Tintin 2 we "can expect to meet Cuthbert Calculus". The first film introduced us to Tintin (Jamie Bell), Snowy and Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), so Professor Calculus, the hard-of-hearing genius, is the last main big character we've still be introduced to.


So, given that we can now rule out Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun, and given that it's also very unlikely to pick up immediately where Secret of the Unicorn left off (effectively ruling out a continuation of Red Rackham's Treasure), the last obvious choice is The Calculus Affair. The Calculus Affair, one of the later Tintin stories, sees Tintin, Haddock and Snowy travelling across the globe to rescue an abducted Professor Cuthbert Calculus; with some fiddling with the story and continuity, this could act as a very effective introduction for the beloved character.

We've heard rumours of this in the past, but it's nice to have some more solid confirmation.

Oh, and yes, I am now a huge Tintin fan.

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