Blistering barnacles! Spielberg plans to turn Tintin, the cub reporter, into Hollywood's latest adventure hero

The Belgians will be up in arms. America's Jewish lobby may have a thing or two to say about it. Cartoon-lovers across the world will tut-tut at the shameless commercialisation of one of their beloved icons, and will no doubt flood the internet with nit-picking complaints about every tiniest script change and bit-part casting choice.

One thing, though, seems certain about yesterday's news that Steven Spielberg is acquiring the rights to Tintin: the enterprise will make pots and pots of money. Always assuming, of course, that it really happens. DreamWorks, the boutique studio that Mr Spielberg runs with his Hollywood buddies Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, put out the official announcement yesterday, but was careful to point out that talks with Moulinsart, the company that owns and markets the Tintin brand, have not yet been completed.

Quite what that means is anybody's guess. It could be that the contract signing is a mere formality. It could be that the press release was intended to push the comic book series' owners over the last outstanding negotiating hump. Or it could be that Spielberg and Co are testing the public's reaction before they make the final commitment.

Tintin, after all, is a great temptation in today's Hollywood, but the intrepid boy reporter and his ever-faithful dog Snowy also come with a few caveats attached. On the plus side are the proven business nostrums about adapting a popular comic to the big screen in this age of cross-marketing and multi-media merchandising: you have instant brand recognition, limitless free publicity at your fingertips, golden possibilities to sell Tintin dolls, Tintin schoolbags, Tintin toothbrushes and much other paraphernalia, and the opportunity to capitalise on initial success with a virtually endless line-up of sequels.

Everyone in Hollywood these days is looking for the product known – incorrectly, according to the business school pedants in town, but never mind – as a franchise. In other words, a property that can generate profits on several fronts at once, and keep generating them year after year, the closest thing in the notoriously fickle film world to a safe investment. Harry Potter is the dream franchise come true, and so is Spider-Man. James Bond, whose latest adventure is just now rolling out on screens across the globe, is perhaps the oldest franchise in town.

Mr Spielberg himself has dipped his toe in the swirling stream of film franchises in the past – think of the Indiana Jones series, or the now sputtering Jurassic Park – but those were produced under the Universal Studios banner. DreamWorks has not, until now, had the financial muscle or the multi-media outlets to contemplate a full-scale commercial assault on our collective senses. Clearly, though, its coming of age as a grown-up movie studio will be tested by its ability to compete with the big boys. Tintin is as promising a property as they come, with more than 200 million of the adventures sold to date in more than 50 countries. Granted, DreamWorks is teaming up for the deal with Universal, but that is a matter of having fingers in enough marketing pies as much as generating the requisite start-up capital.

So what are the downsides? From a film-making point of view, perhaps the most daunting task is making Tintin work as a live-action adventure for today's popcorn-fuelled teenage audiences. To date, the Tintin books have been most successfully adapted as animation adventures for television. There were two attempts in the early 1960s to create a live-action version, but these are now considered to have been unmitigated disasters.

Those films, made in French under the titles Tintin et la Toison d'Or (Tintin and the Golden Fleece) and Tintin et les Oranges Bleues (Tintin and the Blue Oranges), were foolhardy enough to depart from the original comic books by the Belgian Georges Rémi, who used the pen name Hergé, and generate their own utterly uninspiring scripts. The actors, meanwhile, were modelled so closely on the drawings that they failed to come to life as human beings and looked plain silly on the screen. The career of Jean-Pierre Talbot, the actor who played Tintin, imploded on impact, and he was never heard from again. As if that were not deterrent enough, Mr Spielberg can be sure that his acquisition will raise all the old questions about Hergé's anti-Semitism and general racial stereotyping, and the degree of his collaboration with the Nazis in wartime Belgium. You can already hear the usual rent-a-quote advocacy groups screaming: why is the man who made Schindler's List, the most successful film ever made about the Holocaust, sullying his hands with a comic-book author who depicted Jews as untrustworthy, hook-nosed international conspirators – the very stereotypes the Nazis pushed to justify their extermination programme?

We don't know yet how Mr Spielberg will anticipate such criticisms, but there is a fair chance he will emphasise the escapist adventurism of the Tintin series and undertake to remove all hint of political incorrectness from the depiction of the strip's heroes and villains. One can safely assume that the Second World War background and comic-book escapism of the series are what drew Mr Spielberg into the project in the first place – after all, those elements have inspired just about every one of his other projects over the past 20 years. The fact that he made Schindler's List, and that he is Jewish, should probably be enough to reassure the public at large that Tintin is safe in his hands.

A thornier problem could be the very notion – particularly in Belgium – that a Hollywood big-shot has got his hands on a beloved national treasure. Already, Moulinsart is been plunged into controversy in Tintin's homeland because it is run by an Englishman called Nick Rodwell, who is married to Hergé's widow, Fanny. Mr Rodwell has been accused of every low, mean trick in the book – marrying strictly for money, pushing out his former business partner in his mad lust for power and now maintaining obsessive control over the Hergé empire contrary to the spirit of the original enterprise.

Mr Rodwell told The Independent in an interview three years ago that such accusations come with the territory – not a good omen for Mr Spielberg, especially given the suspicion with which American cultural imperialism is regarded in the French-speaking world. These are, however, early days. There is no formal deal yet. DreamWorks said yesterday it was still casting about for a screenwriter, never mind a director or the rudiments of a cast.

We don't know which of the adventures will be first up for adaptation, or if DreamWorks would prefer to amalgamate two or three.

Surely it won't be the first in the series, the irredeemably reactionary, pre-Cold War Tintin in the Land of the Soviets? Surely it won't be the moon adventures, more than 30 years after Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11?

Perhaps, given the current geopolitical interest in the Middle East, they'll opt for Tintin in the Land of Black Gold. In place of the old anti-Jewish stereotypes, they can insert some up-to-date anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes.

One can see it now: Haley Joel Osment as Tintin, Robin Williams as Captain Haddock, some dependable British character actor such as Ian Holm as Nestor. Just wait a couple of years, and it could all come to pass at a multiplex near you.

Innocent boy in plus fours was only European to challenge Disney's might

By Adrian Hamilton

Who can look at a pair of plus fours without thinking of Tintin? Prince Charles can wear what he likes, but plus-fours and woolly socks means our intrepid Belgian cub reporter, just as any man with a beard and a sailor's cap must shout "jumping jehosephats" and British inspectors with moustaches and bowler hats must be called Thomson and Thompson.

There are writers who people a world and there are writers who turn yours into theirs. Think PG Woodehouse and you come close to appreciating just what Hergé's genius meant.

They were both innocents who created characters entirely free of the tensions, the violence, let alone the decadence, of the world around them. But they did it with an art and a humour that was anything but naïve or unknowing.

Hergé's strip cartoon actually did take on real stories of evil empires, dastardly plots for world dominance and military invasions (think King Ottaker's Sceptre – a straight representation of the small countries facing the fear of the jack-boot) as well as the obvious Boys Own adventures in far off space and the deepest jungles of Central America.

But realism never was the point. Tintin and his friends were without pasts, without personal complexity and largely without sex. Even the name Tintin is neither male nor female, first or surname, while his friends are all "braves types". In that sense Herge is very Continental and – to many English tastes at least – far too arch.

Yet the extraordinary things is that, of all Europe's cartoon creations, Tintin is the only one that has ever seriously challenged Disney. Asterix is cleverer, the jokes funnier and the humour more subversive (as well as more contemporary). But he has never crossed the Atlantic nor the Pacific. With Tintin you're thinking global, you're recording sales of two hundred million books.

Why? We're wrong to ask. There is in the world of the adventure story, where the hero can never be defeated, the villains always go too far and the people are all caricatures, something we take to ourselves as a child and never quite leave as an adult. It isn't innocence, for to work cartoon baddies have to be clever and genuinely threatening. It isn't sentimentality, for Tintin (like the best of Disney) and his chums are always a little bit too confused and accident-prone to be sickly. You love them because they're just what you want the characters and an adventure story to be.