Blake and Mortimer: The Yellow Mark will be adapted for the cinema

A major challenge. A Belgian producer has announced the project to adapt for the cinema, in live action, The Yellow Mark, an album by Blake and Mortimer considered one of the masterpieces of comics. Production of this film in English should begin in the fall, with casting targeting “English actors aged 30 to 40, but not closed to Hollywood stars,” announced a spokesperson for the company Belga Films Group in the AFP.

The direction of this European production is entrusted to Cédric Nicolas-Troyan, who worked on the recent Netflix series Furies and signed in 2016 a big budget film with Chris Hemsworth, Charlize Theron and Jessica Chastain, The Huntsman and the Ice Queen. Belgian director Jan Kounen worked on the script. Filming should begin this fall in Belgium, according to Le Parisien. “We hope for a release for Christmas 2025. At the latest, in the first half of 2026,” Patrick Vandenbosh, the producer, told our colleagues.

La Marque jaune, released as an album in 1956, is one of the flagship works of Franco-Belgian comics and the clear line. Francis Blake and Philip Mortimer investigate a mysterious criminal in London who signs his crimes with an M and ridicules Scotland Yard. This is one of the first plots of Blake and Mortimer, one of the biggest successes in comics, available in around thirty volumes and sold more than 20 million copies in 15 languages. Adapting this gem of the ninth art to the big screen is a real challenge: “We will of course be faithful to this formidable trio, Blake, Mortimer and Olrik, the villain. But we are going to expand to all the characters in the universe created by Jacobs and play more on comedy and humor. There will also be, what we don't find in comics, two beautiful female roles,” explained Patrick Vandenbosh, still at Le Parisien.