Peter Jackson Says Spielberg's Tintin Has Finished Filming, Computer Animation Will Take Two Years, Updates On Hobbit

Now this is truly bittersweet news to report. While in London for The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson updated the BBC on the status of Steven Spielberg's Tintin and confirmed that filming is complete. The kicker? It'll take about two years for the computer animation to be completed (remember this is a 3D motion-captured CG film).

I suppose we shouldn't have expected any better when they announced that the film would be released on December 23, 2011—but I was still hoping that through some miracle we'd see the film earlier.

Tintin is great. It's made. The movie is cut together and now [we] are turning it into a fully-rendered film... So the movie, to some degree, exists in a very rough state.

While improvements in computer processing may eventually allow them to complete the film sooner, I don't suspect that Paramount will budge from their current release schedule. I'm just hoping we get annual releases for the other films in the trilogy to make up for this torturous wait.

As for The Hobbit, we previously mentioned that the first script was completed, but Jackson spilled more info to the BBC. He mentioned that he was scouting locations in New Zealand prior to arriving in London, and that there would be continuity between his film's and Guillermo Del Toro's Hobbit:

We're writing the screenplays with him, so in terms of the script, there is continuity.

We're writing Ian McKellen's dialogue just the same as we did in Lord Of The Rings. But Guillermo, being the director, will obviously take the script and interpret that and shoot his film. So that'll be interesting to see.

That's actually the reason I wanted him to do it. I felt like I'd be trying to compete with myself and deliberately do things differently, which is not the way I want to work. I want it to be natural.

Jackson also confirmed that Del Toro will be shooting the picture on film (which he prefers since it will keep the look of the earlier films), and that 3D isn't a consideration. He does believe 3D "only adds to the experience" (it's a big part of the Tintin trilogy, after all).

I honestly haven't revisited The Lord of the Rings trilogy recently, but this recent influx of Jackson news has given me the urge. Now I just wish they quit holding back on that upcoming Blu-ray set.