Disney Picks Up Neil Gaiman's 'Graveyard Book'

4:31 PM PDT 4/27/2012 by Borys Kit

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Veteran producer Gil Netter will produce the big-screen adaptation with Ben Browning.

Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

Neil Gaiman

Disney has picked up Neil Gaiman’s Newberry Award-winning novel The Graveyard Book.

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Gil Netter, a veteran producer with adaptations including Marley & Me and the upcoming Life of Pi among his credits, is producing with Ben Browning.

The book tells of a boy named Nobody Owens who is raised by ghosts in a cemetery after his family is murdered. When he is a teen, he is pursued again by his family’s killer, a being named “the Man Jack.”

Several companies, Miramax among them, have tried and failed to get an adaptation of the 2008 book off the ground. Neil Jordan was developing one iteration of it, as was Chris Columbus’ 1492 Productions. Prior to Disney snapping up the rights, the book was with CGI animation house Framestore.

Gaiman, repped by CAA, is well known as the author of his DC/Vertigo comic book series The Sandman. Among his prose work, Coraline was adapted into a stop-motion animated feature by Laika while Matthew Vaughan directed Stardust.