Illustrating the book’s themes about the ruthless order of natural selection—where all are fair game to eat or be eaten, be they scatting orangutans or movie reboots—Disney has launched its own remake of The Jungle Book, sending it into the wild to compete with the one already being developed at Warner Bros. and another, 3-D animated one being made in India. Like the Warner Bros. project, Disney’s new take will be live-action, differing from both Disney’s 1967 animated version and its 1994 live-action version through adaptive evolution, by sloughing off the superfluous traits of singing bears and Jason Scott Lee.
Unlike the Warner Bros. version—which already has Harry Potter scribe Steve Kloves out foraging the public domain, hoping to create a more “realistic” version of Rudyard Kipling's story where an orphan is not immediately eaten by animals, their vicious maws growing slick with his tender entrails, his only lesson learned being that of the fragility of life (and one learned far too late)—Disney’s version has only the basic idea of extending a franchise and Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li screenwriter Justin Marks, two of the barest of necessities of moviemaking life. Still, any Disney Jungle Book seems likely to be the dominant species—particularly once Disney fulfills the process of evolution by finally turning Johnny Depp into its dancing monkey.