Jon Favreau's THE JUNGLE BOOK 2 is Being Developed From Unused Ideas From The Animated Film

Director Jon Favreau and writer Justin Marks are currently in the process of developing the script for The Jungle Book 2 for Disney. During a recent interview with /Film, Marks offered up some details on where they are getting their ideas for the sequel. One of the cool things that he reveals is that they dove into the Disney archives and pulled out a bunch of unused ideas for the original 1967 animated film and they are going to implement them into their story. Those ideas come from a script that Walt Disney rejected. 

"In the second film, the idea is to go further through the Kipling but also go into some of the Disney resources from the ’67 film that maybe didn’t get to see the light of day in the first film. If you look back to Bill Peet’s work on the original film, some of which was thrown out by Walt Disney, Jon [Favreau] and I really dove deep into the Disney archives to see some of the ideas. We were like, ‘Wait, that’s a great idea. We really need that in the film.’ So we’ve built it out like that."

They will also dive into more of Rudyard Kipling source material. As you may or may not know Kipling also wrote a sequel to The Jungle Book so there's plenty of material to pull from. Marks went on to say:

"There is so much more Kipling to adapt. I just finished a draft of it quite recently. Even in the first film, we really looked to the other Kipling stories for inspiration, The Elephant and the history and the mythology and the creation of the jungle."

For those of you familiar with The Jungle Book story, it continues the journey of Mowgli as he returns to the world of men. The end of the book and the original animated movie ended with Mowgli returning to the village. Favreau's film didn't end that way, and when asked if that's where the sequel would go Marks said:

"I won’t get into spoilers. The Kipling [story] ends with Mowgli returning to the man village, returning to man in some way. Obviously we wanted to suspend that at the end of the film, mostly because I felt like in a story of identity and appropriated identity, a boy from one world raised in another, it was important to Jon and it was important to me to tell a story about family being what you make of it, and identity being the people around you and that’s who you are. So it didn’t feel right to send him to another place, at least in the first film. A later film, maybe we reevaluate that."

The Jungle Book 2 doesn’t have a release date yet, but Favreau will really start to dig in when he's finished with The Lion King.