The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman's wonderful riff on The JungleBook was set to become an animated feature way back in 2009, with Neil Jordan set to direct for Miramax. Disney then purchased the film rights in 2012 and hired Henry Selick to oversee the project. However, scheduling and creative differences led to his departure and Ron Howard came aboard in 2013. Since then, the project has lain relatively dormant.
Speaking to Collider about the Amazon Prime adaptation of Good Omens, Gaiman revealed that the project has been enduring an endless cycle of rewrites.
"With The Graveyard Book, that makes me sad. It was sold to the Walt Disney Company because Henry Selick, who made Coraline, was at Pixar, at the time, and wanted to make it. They were going to make it as Pixar’s first adapted film. It was going to be stop-motion animation, like Coraline. I was really excited. That was why I went there. Then, Henry wound up leaving with a film that he got half-way through and then abandoned, and it was closed down by Alan Horn.
Since then, every 18 months, the same cycle has been happening, where they tell me that they’ve got a new writer on it. Then, a few months later, they send me a script and it’s okay. It’s 75% of the way there. It reads a lot like the last scripts that were done. And then, they tell me that they’re out for a rewrite. Normally, I don’t get sent the rewritten script. They just tell me, “No, we don’t really like it. But we’ve got an idea for a writer who’s going to really nail this.”
And then, a few months later, they tell me that they’ve hired the new writer, and it begins again. That’s been happening since they bought The Graveyard Book. I really hope that they make it, and that they make it into something good. I would be perfectly happy for The Graveyard Book to be a TV series. I wouldn’t mind. I’d also love it to be a fantastic movie. That would be wonderful.”
Fans looking to scratch their Harry Potter itch would definitley enjoy the novel and an animated film would shine some much-deserved light on one of Gaiman's often over-looked works of fiction.