When director Steven Spielberg’s animated pic The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn was first announced, Spielberg and producer Peter Jackson made it clear that their intention was to switch roles on a proposed sequel, with Jackson then taking the helm as director and Spielberg assuming the role of producer. Though not a massive success domestically, Tintin did swell business overseas, raking in a worldwide total of $373.9 million. We’ve been hearing from both Spielberg and Jackson that they still plan on making the Tintin sequel for the past couple of years now, but production has yet to begin. The latest we heard was from Spielberg earlier this year, who said they were hoping to have the follow-up ready for a 2015 release.

So what’s the holdup? Well you can chalk it up to Jackson expanding his The Hobbit adaptation to three films. The director recently provided an update on Tintin, revealing that he plans on moving back on to Tintin once he’s finished with The Hobbit. Hit the jump to read on.

Speaking with BadTaste.it (via CS) at the premiere of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Jackson said progress on the Tintin sequel will resume once he’s finished with The Hobbit:

“As soon as I’m free of The Hobbit, I’ll be going back into doing Tintin. It was held up by The Hobbit, but we have every intention of doing another Tintin movie and it’s just waiting on me to be done with these Hobbit movies.”

The initial plan was to film the performance capture portion of the Tintin sequel earlier this year before Jackson went into post-production on Smaug, but that was derailed when Jackson had to go back into additional filming on The Hobbit in order to expand the adaptation into a trilogy. Given that Jackson went back for additional filming on all three Lord of the Rings films, there will likely be a small bit of pickups for The Hobbit: There and Back Again next year, but if for some reason there’s not, it’s possible that Jackson could squeeze a month of Tintin shooting into his schedule at some point. But that’s a big “if”.

Judging by his comments here, it sounds like Tintin won’t be picking back up again until after the release of There and Back Again next December, so the earliest release window for a Tintin sequel now seems to be 2016 given the extensive amount of post-production needed to render and animate the performance capture portions of the film.

Watch the video interview with Jackson below.