Ron Howard in Talks to Direct Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book for Disney as Live-Action Film

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Disney’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book finds new life in director Ron Howard.  Last April, Disney picked up the feature rights to The Graveyard Book with plans to reunite director Henry Selick (Coraline) with another Gaiman work.  Then, just this past August, Disney put a halt to the production, which was then slotted for stop-motion animation, citing creative issues.  The latest twist is not only that Howard is reportedly in negotiations to helm the picture, but that it will be a live-action adaptation (which is interesting considering most of the characters are dead…).

Heat Vision reports that Howard is in talks to direct The Graveyard Book as a live-action adaptation of Gaiman’s Jungle Book-inspired story.  The children’s story was a winner of both the Carnegie and Newbery medals, marking the first time a book achieved such a feat.  Howard, meanwhile, is currently putting the finishing touches onRush, a Formula-1 racing movie starring Chris Hemsworthand Daniel Bruhl, which opens September 20, 2013.  He also recently signed on to adapt the fantasy adaptation,All I’ve Got, so we’ll see how his schedule works out.

Check out the book description below (via Amazon):

It takes a graveyard to raise a child.

Nobody Owens, known as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn’t live in a graveyard, being raised by ghosts, with a guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the dead. There are adventures in the graveyard for a boy—an ancient Indigo Man, a gateway to the abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible Sleer. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, he will be in danger from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod’s family.