Fast-forward a decade or two and technology was gradually catching up with the Spielberg imagination. His original option having lapsed in the late ‘80s, Spielberg threw his hat into the ring once again by re-buying the Tintin rights in 2003, with DreamWorks announcing the project as greenlit later that year.

So how come Steve was ready to get serious all of a sudden? Well, it turned out he had something of a secret weapon up his sleeve in the form of an announcement that Peter Jackson had agreed to produce the film. Suddenly, a project that had always been lacking technological clout now had the backing of the weird and wonderful WETA Digital to bring Hergé’s creations to life.

The new plan was to create a trilogy of Tintin films, with Spielberg behind the camera for the first instalment, and Jackson taking charge of the second. Matters are a little less clear surrounding the third film, but there remains the mouth-watering prospect of both beards teaming up to co-direct the concluding episode!

In any case, the pair’s enthusiasm seemed irresistable, with Spielberg confident that through initial motion-capture experiments, they had cracked a winning formula for how to present the film. “Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul,” he gushed to Variety. “They go far beyond anything we've seen to date with computer animated characters.”