Hollywood Is Making Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book & A New The Jungle Book Film

I doubt there was any sort of discussion about these two projects being announced at the same time but I appreciate the coincidence nonetheless. Henry Selick, of Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas fame, is set to direct Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book for Disney. The novel was loosely based on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book which also just happens to be getting some new attention in Hollywood right now. Harry Potter screenwriter Steven Kloves will be writing and directing The Jungle Book for Warner Bros. Please let these movies come out at the same time so I can make a double feature out of them. 

Deadline writes, “The book, which won the Newbery Medal among other awards, is a riff on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Instead of a boy raised by wolves in the jungle, Gaiman tells the story of the surviving child of a murdered family raised by ghosts in a graveyard.” Nobody Owens is the boy’s name

Selick is already at work at another, top-secret stop-motion film for Pixar and although The Graveyard Book is not that project, it will begin production once he’s done with it. Gaiman posted on his tumblr saying, “I’ve been around Henry’s stop motion studio studio in San Francisco, and although I signed a piece of paper swearing to reveal nothing of what I saw inside to the world, I can confidently state that the film Henry is making now is definitely not The Graveyard Book.”

But that’s not to say The Graveyard Book, now in search of a screenwriter, won’t be stop-motion. After all, that’s what Selick is known for and he directed Gaiman’s Coraline.

The new Jungle Book project from Kloves however, will be live-action according to Deadline. There’s no other details on that project at this time but many of you are probably familiar with the Disney animated The Jungle Book from 1967. Kloves has worked on both the Amazing Spider-Man and Akira screenplays post-Potter.

Are you a fan of either of the books? What do you think of the news?

(via Deadline)

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Jill Pantozzi

Jill Pantozzi is a pop-culture journalist and host who writes about all things nerdy and beyond! She’s Editor in Chief of the geek girl culture site The Mary Sue (Abrams Media Network), and hosts her own blog “Has Boobs, Reads Comics” (TheNerdyBird.com). She co-hosts the Crazy Sexy Geeks podcast along with superhero historian Alan Kistler, contributed to a book of essays titled “Chicks Read Comics,” (Mad Norwegian Press) and had her first comic book story in the IDW anthology, “Womanthology.” In 2012, she was featured on National Geographic’s "Comic Store Heroes," a documentary on the lives of comic book fans and the following year she was one of many Batman fans profiled in the documentary, "Legends of the Knight."

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