Andy Serkis’ postponed Jungle Book: Origins will offer up a “darker, scarier” version of Rudyard Kipling’s classic adventure tale.
That’s according to the writer-director-actor himself, who revealed the tonal differences with Disney and Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book in an interview with Vulture. There, Serkis likened Origins‘ target audience to that of Fox’s lucrative Apes franchise, bringing it closer to the tone found in Kipling’s original story.
As such, it seems safe to assume the 2018 release will be aligning itself with a PG-13 rating, and here the performance maestro touched base on how it’ll differ from this year’s The Jungle Book.
“Ours is for a slightly older audience,” Serkis said. “It’s a PG-13, more a kind of ‘Apes’ movie, a slightly darker take, closer to Rudyard Kipling’s. It’s great to scare kids in a safe environment because it’s an important part of development, and we all loved to be scared as kids, so we shouldn’t overly protect them. Kids are so sophisticated, and that is why our ‘Jungle Book’ is quite dark. … It’s a story of an outsider, someone who is trying to accept the laws and customs of a particular way of living and then has to adapt to another culture, a human culture, which of course he should be able to adapt to, because this is what he is. So it’s about two different species and their laws and customs, and neither are entirely right.”
On board to play the part of Baloo, Serkis’ directorial debut is also set to star Freida Pinto, Matthew Rhys and Rohan Chand in live-action roles with Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jack Reynor and Tom Hollander in the voice booth. It also recently drafted in Children of Men and Gravity‘s Alfonso Cuarón to doctor the script.
Once on course to arrive next year, Jungle Book: Origins will grace theaters on October 19, 2018.