What with all the hullabaloo about Jon Favreau and Disney's effects-filled take on The Jungle Book, which arrives here next week, you might be forgiven for forgetting that Andy Serkis has been working on his own version. But if you were excited by that prospect, you're going to have to be even more patient, as Warner Bros. has moved Jungle Book: Origins back a year to 2018 in a new round of schedule shuffling.
The movie has already seen one release date change, and had the disadvantage of arriving a while after Favreau's film. But perhaps a further shift will actually be to its advantage, allowing memories to cool and comparisons to dim. After having worked extensively on the Hobbit trilogy as a second unit director, he's stepping up to using this as his full directorial debut, having recruited the likes of Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hollander, Matthew Rhys and Naomie Harris to provide the performance capture for the various animals, and playing Baloo himself.
And Serkis himself seems pleased with the chance to refine his techniques. "I've got to say that personally I'm absolutely thrilled that Warner Brothers have changed the delivery date of Jungle Book: Origins, he wrote on Facebook. "The ambition for this project is huge. What we are attempting is an unprecedented level of psychological and emotional nuance in morphing the phenomenal performances of our cast into the facial expressions of our animals. We are breaking new ground with realistic non-humanoid animal faces, such as a panther or wolf, ensuring that they convincingly communicate with human language and emotion via performance capture, and are able to stand up to real scrutiny in richly complex dramatic scenes.
"So, every minute more that we have to evolve the technological pipeline will make all the difference...the evidence is there already and it's off the chain exciting, so hang on in there...This is truly next generation storytelling, and it will be the real deal!"
And Origins was not the only film on the move. The studio is playing calendar swapsies and has shifted Wonder Woman a couple of weeks earlier to June 2, 2017, at least in the US. It has also added two untitled DC Comics films for October 5, 2018 and November 1, 2019, while also pushing another to fill Origins' old slot of October 6, 2017. The Jungle Book adaptation is shifting to October 19, 2018.