'Indiana Jones Meets Agatha Christie' Series With 39 Episodes Beats Spielberg At His Own Game

Via MovieStillsDB Published Nov 15, 2026, 4:30 PM EST Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock. Sign in to your ScreenRant account Steven Spielberg brought Hergé’s beloved Tintin character to the attention of a much wider, younger audience when he directed a dazzling blockbuster movie adaptation in 2011. Jamie Bell starred as Tintin, Andy Serkis provided strong support as his grizzled sidekick Captain Haddock, and a crack filmmaking team brought Hergé’s cartoons to life in a gorgeous, lived-in 3D animated world. But Tintin was an icon in Europe long before Spielberg introduced him to American audiences. Decades before Spielberg would bring Tintin to the big screen in an animated movie, he appeared in live-action movies, stop-motion movies, and a couple of animated TV shows. The first TV adaptation ran in the ‘60s, but its four-minute episodes barely had room to tell a story. In the early ‘90s, during HBO’s brief push into original animated programming, a French studio and a Canadian studio co-produced three seasons of The Adventures of Tintin, comprised of half-hour episodes with plenty of room to breathe. Spielberg’s movie is great; it’s a dazzling visual feast, a rollicking buddy comedy, and it came a lot closer to recapturing the pulpy magic of the original Indiana Jones trilogy than Spielberg’s own Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or James Mangold’s Dial of Destiny. But the source material gave him a leg up — Hergé’s comics combine the globetrotting action of an Indiana Jones movie with the twisty intrigue of an Agatha Christie mystery — and the animated show from the ‘90s is even better. The Adventures Of Tintin TV Series Is Better Than The Movie Spielberg’s Tintin movie made Hergé’s characters and storylines accessible to a wider audience through the explosive spectacle and white-knuckle pacing of an action blockbuster, but the animated series was a much closer adaptation. The heart and soul of the Tintin stories is the characters. The titular Tintin is a boy detective, chasing criminals with his trusty canine sidekick. He has a handful of trusted associates, like Captain Haddock (the Victor Sullivan to Tintin’s Nathan Drake) and the hilarious double act of Thomson and Thompson, and he encounters a delightfully eccentric villain in each story. The movie certainly has that heart — Spielberg takes every opportunity to slow down for a little character moment — but the TV show had a lot more opportunities. I love the Spielberg movie, but the source material was better-suited to episodic television. The charm of Hergé’s comics is getting to see Tintin’s day-to-day life, as he and Snowy search for clues, ruffle feathers with the locals, and hang out with their fellow crimefighters, and the animated series could spend half of every episode indulging in those quieter “hangout” moments. Tintin Will Have A Second Bite At The Big Screen Cherry (Finally) 15 years after The Adventures of Tintin arrived in theaters, the sequel is finally moving forward. We’ve been hearing talk of a second movie since the first one came out, but it seems to finally be happening. In early 2026, Peter Jackson said he was developing a Tintin sequel script with Fran Walsh for himself to direct. In mid-2026, he confirmed it would be his next project. Last month, he confirmed that the script was finished. Tintin 2 is closer to happening than ever before. We’ve been burned in the past, so don’t get your hopes up. The good news is that the technology used to make the Tintin films will allow Bell and Serkis to pick up where they left off, no matter how much older than their characters they get, so this is one of the few sequels that can handle a decade-and-a-half’s worth of delays. But even if Jackson does make an Adventures of Tintin sequel as his next movie, it’ll still be at least a couple of years before we see it. In the meantime, check out the old animated series.