Peter Jackson Is Back – The Legendary Director Reveals His Next Big Movie

More than a decade has passed since Peter Jackson last sat in the director’s chair for a narrative feature film, with his career since then largely shifting toward producing and documentary work. That drought is finally coming to an end, and the project bringing him back is not a new trip to Middle-earth, but a long-delayed return to a very different corner of pop culture.

Jackson’s last narrative directing credit was 2014’s ‘The Hobbit, The Battle of the Five Armies’, after which he shifted focus toward producing efforts like ‘Mortal Engines’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings, The War of the Rohirrim’, alongside documentary work including ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’ and ‘The Beatles, Get Back’.

Fans have spent years wondering whether he would ever step back behind the camera for a proper narrative feature again.

That wait is officially over. Speaking exclusively with Gold Derby, Jackson confirmed that his next directing project will be a sequel to ‘The Adventures of Tintin’. “Probably the next film that I’d actually direct is a ‘Tintin’ movie,” Jackson told Gold Derby, explaining that he and longtime writing partner Fran Walsh have just wrapped a script for the follow-up to Steven Spielberg’s 2011 original.

The arrangement traces back to a promise made well over a decade ago. When Spielberg directed the first Tintin film, ‘The Secret of the Unicorn’, back in 2011, the plan was always for the two filmmakers to swap roles on a sequel, with Jackson taking over as director while Spielberg stepped into a producing role. “The idea was that then I was supposed to go straight onto a second one, and we’d swap the roles, so I’d direct the second one, and he’d produce it. It’s just taken 15 years to get there, unfortunately, a bit late,” Jackson said.

That delay stretched on far longer than anyone originally anticipated, with the project effectively going dormant for well over a decade despite Spielberg first publicly confirming Jackson’s intent to direct back in 2018. Jackson offered more detail on the sequel’s development earlier this year during an appearance at the Cannes Film Festival, where he revealed he was actively writing pages of the script from his hotel room while attending the festival to receive an honorary Palme d’Or.

According to Jackson’s comments at Cannes, the new film picks up directly where Spielberg’s original left off, beginning exactly where ‘The Secret of the Unicorn’ ended rather than jumping ahead in the timeline. He also confirmed the finished script would be sent to Spielberg for approval, though Jackson expressed confidence that his longtime collaborator would sign off on the direction they landed on.

Jackson is not diving straight into the Tintin sequel just yet, however. He remains occupied for now as a producer on Andy Serkis’s upcoming film ‘The Lord of the Rings, The Hunt for Gollum’, which began production in New Zealand this summer and bridges the gap between his Hobbit trilogy and the original ‘Lord of the Rings’ films. Jackson noted that he and Serkis have drawn inspiration from Todd Phillips’s ‘Joker’ in shaping how the Gollum focused story approaches its central character’s psychology.

The original ‘Adventures of Tintin’ performed strongly overseas upon release, grossing 374 million dollars globally against a domestic total of 77.5 million dollars, and went on to win the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature while earning a pair of BAFTA nominations. That international success, paired with the built-in audience still passionate about Hergé’s century-old source material, gives the long-gestating sequel a solid commercial foundation heading into production.

With ‘The Hunt for Gollum’ currently scheduled for a December 2027 release and no firm timeline yet announced for when Jackson’s Tintin script will move into production, fans still have some waiting ahead of them before Jackson’s narrative directing comeback actually reaches theaters. Given how long this particular sequel has already taken to materialize, though, simply having a completed script represents real progress.

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