Disney Is Dragging Their Feet on the Best Neil Gaiman Adaptation
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman was published in 2008, 23 years after the award-winning author first conceived of the idea. Now, it seems the film adaptation may take just as long to finally happen. Disney has owned the rights to the movie since 2012, and in that time, it has been through several directors, multiple screenplays, and even over to Pixar for a bit. What’s going on?
The Graveyard Book
The Graveyard Book is a young adult book centered around a boy, Nobody “Bod” Owens, who lives in a graveyard under the care of the ghosts who reside there. It is wonderfully written, with magic, mystery, murder, and mayhem alongside love, empathy, compassion, and sorrow.
We enter the story when Bod is still a baby, escaping from his crib in the middle of the night and going on an adventure. As Bod crawls innocently from his house, a murderer, the man Jack, enters the home and murders the other three members of Bod’s family. He goes in to murder the baby in the crib and finds him gone.
An Imaginative Tale About Life Among The Spirits
The reader is gripped by the thriller unfolding in just these opening few pages of The Graveyard Book. The man, Jack, races to catch the baby, but Bod is led to the graveyard by the ghost of his mother. There, she implores the ghosts inside to protect him. Mr. and Mrs. Owens agree to raise Bod, and Silas, who manages to live both inside and outside the lands of the living and the dead, agrees to help.
From this point in the story, we leap forward two years with each chapter, watching Bod grow up and have adventures in the graveyard, both with the living and the dead. We see him meet a living girl and make friends, and we watch him attend school and learn under the tutelage of Ms. Lupescu.
An Adaptation Could Be As Good As Coraline
If you loved Coraline, either Gaiman’s book or the film adaptation by Henry Selick, you will fall head over heels for The Graveyard Book and be desperately anticipating a great movie rendition.
Henry Selick was actually attached to the film adaptation initially, but he was summarily fired by Disney and is no longer connected. Ron Howard was also named director at one point, but he had other projects that distracted him from the project, so he had to depart. As Gaiman reports, he has heard from Disney several times that the final script is being written, but every time, it falls through.
World War Z Director Was The Last One Attached
The problem may be that there is just too much to cover in this book to make it into an hour-and-a-half-long film.
In July of 2022, it was announced that Marc Forster of World War Z fame was set to direct The Graveyard Book, but here we are almost a year later with no news. So, Neil Gaiman says, why don’t we make a series?
The Graveyard Book Could Be Disney’s Answer To Wednesday
The Graveyard Book would make an excellent addition to the Disney Plus streaming catalog, and generations of fans would surely flock to the platform to watch, just like we binge-watched Stranger Things and Wednesday. It would be a smart move for Disney. Hopefully, it will not take the studio 23 years to make it.
