Steve Kloves is the man as far as Warner Brothers is concerned. Whenever they have a big time, major league project on the way, they know who to turn to. He's made them a crapload of cash by adapting seven of the Harry Potter movies, and when they needed somebody to turn around their failed Akira film, Kloves was the guy on speed dial. Now they're turning to him one more time to pen and direct a live-action adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.
Before you even ask, The Jungle Book doesn't belong to anybody in particular, even though it's most closely associated with Disney thanks to their classic 1967 animated film. They also swung and missed badly on a live-action 1994 film which starred Jason Scott Lee and directed by Stephen Sommers. The Jungle Book was originally published in 1893 and follows Mowgli, a feral child from India raised in the jungle and has wild adventures with a variety of talking animals.
This is a huge deal, and is clearly going to be a priority for the studio. For Kloves, it's another feather in his cap, making this his third directorial effort and first since 1993's Flesh and Bone. He recently co-wrote the script for Sony's The Amazing Spider-Man. [Deadline]
