Walt Disney Pictures has secured the rights to Neil Gaiman’s 2008 Newberry Medal winner The Graveyard Book, Deadline is reporting. Coincidentally, the news arrives just moments after a report that Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is up for a new adaptation at Warner Bros. That 1894 text was the inspiration for Gaiman’s tale of a young boy raised in a graveyard, officially described as follows:
Bod is an unusual boy who inhabits an unusual place-he’s the only living resident of a graveyard. Raised from infancy by the ghosts, werewolves, and other cemetery denizens, Bod has learned the antiquated customs of his guardians’ time as well as their timely ghostly teachings-like the ability to Fade. Can a boy raised by ghosts face the wonders and terrors of the worlds of both the living and the dead? And then there are things like ghouls that aren’t really one thing or the other.
Gaiman’s work has previously been brought to the screen with Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust in 2007 and Henry Selick’s Coraline in 2008. Gaiman’s bestseller American Gods is, meanwhile, in development as an HBO series with Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman’s Playtone producing.
The Graveyard Book was previously targeted for the screen with Neil Jordan writing and directing. Though there’s no confirmation as of yet, Jordan is very likely no longer attached to the project.
