SAN DIEGO
Peter Jackson knew he was a non-American when it comes to Tintin because he has known her since before she could read, and the character's running world adventure is part of the story's own DNA.
Together, the two winners of the Academy Award for film-makers are hoping to accomplish something that escapes from the Belgium artist and author Hergé in Tintin books: a place for heroes in North America.
"The Adventures of Tintin," directed by Spielberg and produced by Jackson, there is already a global blockbuster, approaching $ 250 million at the box office worldwide as it heads to U.S. theatres December 21, two months after it began rolling to the cinema abroad.
This is the opposite of the old patterns of egocentric Hollywood, where a film like Spielberg's "Jaws" will start its work in the country and trickled out to the rest of the world months later. Today, most major film franchises opening almost everywhere around the same time, but the "Tintin" is the only rare big audience the necessary goodwill to sell U.S. foreign crowd on the hero about whom, like Spielberg, most of them have never heard of.