Following the box office success of The Jungle Book, director Jon Favreau is currently hard at work on bringing another of Disney’s animated classics back to the big screen with a “live-action” remake of The Lion King, after which he’ll be returning to the world of Rudyard Kipling for The Jungle Book 2.
Speaking to SlashFilm, screenwriter Justin Marks has been chatting about Favreau’s plans for the Jungle Book sequel, revealing that it will not only incorporate more material from Kipling, but also unused ideas and concepts from the 1967 animated movie.
“In the second film, the idea is to go further through the Kipling but also go into some of the Disney resources from the ’67 film that maybe didn’t get to see the light of day in the first film,” said Marks. “If you look back to Bill Peet’s work on the original film, some of which was thrown out by Walt Disney, Jon [Favreau] and I really dove deep into the Disney archives to see some of the ideas. We were like, ‘Wait, that’s a great idea. We really need that in the film.’ So we’ve built it out like that.”
“There is so much more Kipling to adapt,” he continued. “I just finished a draft of it quite recently. Even in the first film, we really looked to the other Kipling stories for inspiration, The Elephant and the history and the mythology and the creation of the jungle. I won’t get into spoilers. The Kipling [story] ends with Mowgli returning to the man village, returning to man in some way. Obviously we wanted to suspend that at the end of the film, mostly because I felt like in a story of identity and appropriated identity, a boy from one world raised in another, it was important to Jon and it was important to me to tell a story about family being what you make of it, and identity being the people around you and that’s who you are. So it didn’t feel right to send him to another place, at least in the first film. A later film, maybe we reevaluate that.”
The Jungle Book 2 is yet to receive a release date from Disney, but Favreau’s The Lion King is set to hit cinemas on July 19th 2019.
