Planned for the big screen as far back as its 2008 release, Neil Gaiman’s Newberry Medal winner The Graveyard Book looks to have found a new director in Ron Howard, says a story at The Hollywood Reporter.
Inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 classic The Jungle Book, Gaiman’s novel is 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. Selick himself had plans to adapt The Graveyard Book as a stop-motion feature for Walt Disney Pictures, but the new vision of the project has it moving forward as a live-action film.
Howard, meanwhile, will next release his Formula 1 racing movie, Rush, on September 20. His name was also recently said to be connected to the Bad Robot and Paramount Pictures supernatural romance All I’ve Got.
