Moffat Walked Away From Tintin

Steven Moffat, the award winning scriptwriter of Coupling and Dr Who walked away from writing the second Tintin movie.

According to the Daily Mail (so pretty suspect), Moffat was originally contracted to write the first two Tintin films for a cool £1 million. He had completed the first script and handed it over to Spielberg, director of the first film, and was due to start work on the second. However the writer’s strike happened in the US and this prevented Steven Moffat from working. During this time he was offered the Dr Who job at the BBC which he took without a moments hesitation. Not many people would walk away from £500,000 or say no to Steven Spielberg but for a lifelong Dr Who fan it was easy to do.

Moffat departure is bad news for Tintin (though great for Dr Who) because Steven has a track record of great writing and being faithful to the source material. He understands what it is like to be a fan and how the essence of the original work can be remixed in a contemporary setting without ruining it. We don’t know who is going to get or has got the job of scriptwriter for the second film but they have a tough job ahead of them.

That Steven Moffat was only given the contract for the first two films suggest that the three films are not going be tightly linked into one continuous story. More likely, each film will standalone which makes some of the casting decisions curious. The original casting list suggested the three films would be The Crab With The Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure. These would form a natural story arc, focusing around Captain Haddock. However Eric Stoltz has been cast as Doctor Krollspell (apparently) who only appears in Flight 714. Krollspell is closely linked to Tintin’s nemesis Rastapopoulos but Rastapopoulos doesn’t appear in Goldren Claws, Unicorn or Red Rackham.

All of this suggests that the Tintin movies are going to draw characters and incidents from multiple books rather than closely follow a single book. This is worrying as we may be left with a mess rather than a cohesive story.

Source: £500,000 Mr Spielberg? Sorry, I’ve got a date with the Beeb, says the new Dr Who writer