Ron Howard to Direct Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book?

The Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick was working on a stop-motion version of The Graveyard Book for Disney last year, but the project was canceled. It seemed like that was the last we'd hear about the project, but Ron Howard is interested in directing an adaptation of his own.

Heat Vision reports that Ron Howard is in negotiations to direct a live-action version of The Graveyard Book for Disney. From the initial report, it does not appear that Howard will be using any of what was created for Henry Selick's version. It's said that Ron Howard will oversee the writing of a new script and may come on board as a producer with Brian Grazer.

Ron Howard is currently in post-production on Rush with Chris Hemsworth and has been trying to get The Dark Tower off the ground for a number of years. Fans of the Stephen King series that were hoping to see it as his next project may have a longer wait ahead of them.

The Graveyard Book was originally written by Neil Gaiman in 2008 and tells the story of a child being raised in a graveyard:

"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."