Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu was originally aboard and then the studio reached out to Ron Howard, but ultimately directorial duties on Warner Bros’ The Jungle Book have fallen to Andy Serkis whom has yet to direct a feature film himself, but he did serve as second unit director on Peter Jackson‘s The Hobbit films, including the barrel-chase sequence in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.
Callie Kloves wrote the script based on Rudyard Kipling’s short stories centering on Mowgli, an orphaned boy raised by wolves who befriends Baloo the bear and Bagheera the black panther as he spars with the ferocious tiger Shere Khan. Kloves is the daughter of Harry Potter screenwriter Steven Kloves and this will be her first produced screenplay. The film will reportedly stick closely to the source material, which is to say prepare for something dark, nothing like Disney’s 1967 animated classic.
This marks the second live-action Jungle Book film in the works, the second is over at Disney with Jon Favreau directing for a October 9, 2015 release. That film just started casting and as of now only Idris Elba is aboard, voicing Shere Khan. [THR]
