The Hollywood trades are reporting that Steven Spielberg has begun principal photography on The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.  Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot) is starring as the intrepid, globe-trotting reporter, while Daniel Craig (Quantum of Solace, Layer Cake) will play the villainous pirate Red Rackham.  The Secret of the Unicorn, the eleventh of Herge’s 24 Tintin graphic novels, is the first half of a two-part story—Red Rackham’s Treasure, the most popular of all the Tintin books, is the second half of the saga.  Spielberg’s Secret of the Unicorn, which the director is producing along with Kathleen Kennedy and Peter Jackson, is set for a 2011 debut.  Jackson, who spent much of last year working on the motion capture animation technology that will used on the Tintin films, will direct a second Tintin feature.

Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), Steven Moffat (Joking Apart), and Joe Cornish (The Adam and Joe Show) have written the screenplay for The Secret of the Unicorn.  Much of the action in The Secret of the Unicorn takes place in the 17th Century and involves Captain Haddock’s ancestor Sir Francis Haddock and the pirate Red Rackham.  Andy Serkis will play both Haddocks, while Simon Pegg and Nick Frost will portray the hapless detectives Thompson and Thomson.  New characters added to Herge’s original saga include an American Interpol agent, and those staples of newspaper movies, a rival reporter and a bellowing editor.

Paramount and Sony are financing the $130 million film (see “New Tintin Film Deal”).  Paramount will distribute the film in English-speaking countries and Asia, except for India, while Sony will have the rest of the world. 

While sales of Tintin books have been growing slowly in the U.S., domestic sales pale in comparison to the rest of the world where over 200 million copies of Herge’s Tintin graphic novels are in circulation.  It should be interesting to see what sort of effect Spielberg and Jackson’s movie will have on sales of Tintin books here in the States where there is enormous potential, given how popular Herge’s volumes are in the rest of the developed world.