The First TINTIN Pictures Arrive But Will Anyone Care?

I'm serious about the question in the headline. The first proper stills from Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson's The Adventures Of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn have arrived at Empire and though they look quite good - more on that later - they raise a very basic question. Does anybody in North America really give a damn about Tintin? Because - and no offense to the international fan base, which I know is significant - when you spend as big a bag of money making a movie as Spielberg and Jackson have on this pulling in a significant piece of change at the US box office becomes an absolute must. And I just don't know if it's going to happen. The character doesn't seem to have enough recognition on these shores and none of the actors involved are of sufficient stature to really anchor a full on blockbuster. Sure, you've got Spielberg and Jackson but absent some other hook, The Lovely Bones proved that the director's name alone isn't enough.

But on to the images themselves. These actually look very good. And - unlike the Robert Zemeckis motion capture films, which have always puzzled me - this one actually seems to make a good argument for the technology. Because instead of capturing a performance digitally and then just representing it so all the players look how they do in real life but creepier - as Zemeckis does - Jackson and Spielberg are using it to assemble a talented cast and then alter them to look like the source characters. The perplexing Zemeckis approach strips away the benefits of both live action and animated technology, giving you the best of neither, while this actually has a hope of giving audiences the best of both. Very curious to see this in motion.