Alfonso Cuaron is venturing into the jungle. Cuaron, who won an Oscar for directing Gravity for Warner Bros., is heading back to the studio to work on its Jungle Book adaptation. Warner Bros. has been making its own version of the classic Rudyard Kipling stories – Disney’s take, directed by Jon Favreau, just opened to a spectacular $103.2 million – with Andy Serkis, the motion-capture actor behind Lord of the Rings’ Gollum and Caesar, the ape in the Planet of the Apes movies, at the helm. The studio earlier this month pushed back the release date of the movie, which has been in production since March 2015, from Oct. 6, 2017, to over a year later, Oct. 19, 2018. Sources say that Cuaron will “consult” on the project, a Hollywood term that encompasses a lot of vague tasks from assisting in directing to even postproduction work. Jungle Book is Serkis’ first big feature after doing second-unit directing work on the three Hobbit movies.
