Back in April 2016, Andy Serkis wasnt part of the throngs who saw Jon Favreaus The Jungle Book, which made close to $1 billion worldwide during its theatrical run.
After all, Serkis was the director with decades of performance-capture expertise who was supposed to debut his version of The Jungle Book in 2016. He had the all-star cast of Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Naomie Harris. He had the fantastic script by Callie Kloves. He had the backing of a big studio, Warner Bros., that was supposed to turn Rudyard Kiplings 19th-century tale into one of its marquee movies of the year.
Serkis wasnt supposed to be the one sitting in the audience. His name was supposed to be up on the big screen.
“It was an interesting time,” Serkis said of getting himself to see Favreaus movie. “Shall I? Shant I? I was like, I have to, really. I have to do my due diligence.”
Once he finally made it to the theater and saw how beautiful and amazing the Jungle Books set pieces were, “I wasnt ever worried or threatened by that other movie,” Serkis said during a recent interview. Where Favreaus film was a faithful adaptation of Disneys 1967 animated classic, Serkiss version was a deeper exploration into Kiplings world of self-identification and discovery. “I just knew that the positioning of [my film] was going to be a real challenge. That was going to be the thing.”
On Friday, Serkis will finally debut his five-year odyssey into The Jungle Book—now titled Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle—on three screens in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. His film will get a rare-for-Netflix one-week run before it streams on the service on December 7.
Its a far cry from the nationwide theatrical release Serkis first envisioned when Warner Bros. hired him in 2013 to adapt Klovess script as his directorial debut. In that time, the studio has been through two regime changes and merged with AT&T. Mowgli, which could have been a casualty in all the corporate tumult, actually got a second life when Netflix acquired it from Warner Bros. in July; the streamers global distribution model might mean more people will now see the film.
“I genuinely feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders,” Serkis said. “It takes away any worry about being judged on an opening weekend, which in this climate, is what everybody judges the film on. And people would always judge Mowgli against the other release, you know? This way everybody, across the world, will see this movie.”
In 2013, Serkis and his new studio, The Imaginarium—co-founded with his producing partner Jonathan Cavendish—were knee-deep in development on a performance-capture adaptation of George Orwells book, Animal Farm, when he was sent Klovess Mowgli script. “It was such a powerful script that it made us all go, We should do this now,” Serkis said. “I just really fell in love with it as an idea.”
He pushed Orwell to the back burner and gathered a voice cast for his mainly performance-capture film. (“Motion capture [or mo-cap] is just physicality, [whereas] performance capture is facial, audio, you know, [all of it],” Serkis clarified.) Prior to the start of production, Disney green-lit its remake. “It very quickly became a race,” Serkis said. “That was a shame, because it immediately got placed as a fight. [Everyone wanted to know] who was going to get the first punch in.”
Nonetheless, Serkis and his actors trotted off to Leavesden Studios outside London at the end of 2014 to shoot their performances. The process involved gathering everyone on a big stage, outfitting them with a slew of sensors, and letting them play-act as their animal characters with young Mowgli (portrayed by newcomer Rohan Chand).
“We shot it like a play,” said Serkis. “That was really what I wanted to do, to prove that you can play anything as an actor, and because of the emotional connection—youve got two actors working opposite each other—it doesnt matter what scale you are.”
After that initial experiment with performance, which Cavendish calls “one of the most creative and wonderful two weeks of my life,” Serkis jetted to Durbin, South Africa, to shoot the Indian village scenes with additional cast, including Freida Pinto and Matthew Rhys. Meanwhile, the Imaginarium, along with Frame Store—the VFX company behind films like Gravity—was charged with creating a performance-capture technology that adapted the look and texture of the apes from Planet of the Apes to the menagerie of animals that outfitted Mowgli—snakes, bears, panthers, and wolves.
Rohan Chand as Mowgli with Nisha (Naomi Harris) in a scene from Mowgli.
At first, things didnt go well. When Serkis and his team presented the initial test shots to the top brass at Warner Bros., after completing the majority of the films live-action photography, the studio didnt hand over a green-light, despite the fact that the work with the actors was mostly completed.
“Quite rightly Warner Bros. said no,” relayed Cavendish. “And quite rightly, they also said, Have another go. It was very enlightened of them. Im sure one of the reasons they agreed to a second test was they had seen the incredible performances the actors had put in. The second test cracked it.”
But by then, W.B.s head of film production, Jeff Robinov, had been replaced. The new regime, headed by Greg Silverman, was concerned about the films darker tone. And Favreaus version that was hurtling down the tracks.
“They asked for a Jungle Book meets Planet of the Apes,” said Cavendish. “We made that, they saw it, and they slightly panicked.” (Warner Bros. has declined to comment for this story.)
Two weeks before the Favreau films April 2016 debut, Warner Bros. pushed Mowglis release to 2018, giving the film a good two years of breathing room—enough time, the thinking went, to establish a new narrative.
“That was difficult,” said Cavendish. “But that decision to delay was inevitable once it was clear we werent going to get out in front of them.”
With a nearly-finished cut and the beginnings of a special-effects pipeline in the works, production on Mowgli shut down and Serkis and Cavendish went off to shoot another film, Breathe, which starred Andrew Garfield as Cavendishs real father, Robin; that film debuted at the 2017 Toronto Film Festival.
The hiatus also afforded Serkis the opportunity to play Caesar in the third Planet of the Apes film, War for the Planet of the Apes, and to shoot his devilishly delicious bad-guy role of Ulysses Klaue in Marvels Black Panther.
From there, things “drifted, and drifted, and drifted,” according to Serkis, until Toby Emmerich became the new chairman at Warner Bros. and “things accelerated again.”
The studio started testing the film, but without all the completed VFX. “It was very hard to get good scores,” said Serkis. “We were literally showing them 2-D cartoons in place of the animals. It was like a very bad version of Bedknobs and Broomsticks.”
Warner Bros., according to Serkis, still supported the movie, and in March the marketing team brought it to CinemaCon, along with Cumberbatch, Blanchett, Rhys, and Chand, to introduce Mowgli to theater owners. The studio then flew Serkis to Barcelona in June for CineEurope. A month later the studio sold the movie to Netflix.
Industry insiders have cited market confusion over the two Jungle Book films as a reason for the sale, and suggest that spending an additional $40 million to market such a risky proposition wasnt the most fiscally prudent decision for Warner Bros.
“If I were Warner Bros., I would have done the same thing,” said one industry source. “This can be big and noisy for Netflix, and after the $1 billion on Jungle Book and the [sure-to-be] $1.5 billion on the upcoming Lion King, I wouldnt want to try and compete to find some air in the middle of that. If Im a filmmaker, and I have something that is really strong creatively but speculative theatrically, then Netflix is the way to go. Then I dont wake up with a belly ache on Saturday morning looking at the grosses.”
When I spoke with Andy Serkis in October, he had just come from a marketing meeting at Netflix and was thrilled with the streamers plan to host the premiere in Mumbai, India, where the films international sensibility will be more appreciated.
“Because it has very strong links to India and to the colonial past, its almost like an elevated art movie in a way,” said Serkis. “Its not trying to hit the four-quadrant box. It was always a bolder approach, which is why I fell in love with it. Netflix gets that.”
Serkis also thought Netflix got his 3-D version of his film, the technology of which he calls “exceptional.” Yet, the streamer cant do everything, and because of its unique distribution model, its access to theaters with 3-D capabilities is limited. “Thats the one casualty of this process,” confirmed Cavendish. When the movie opens on Friday it will only be on two 3-D screens.
Still, Serkis is optimistic. “Given the journey the film has had, which has at times been challenging, and given that there isnt that pressure on the opening weekend, I think more people will see the film,” he said. “Thats really what I care about.”
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Get Vanity Fairs HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Nicole SperlingNicole Sperling is a Hollywood Correspondent for Vanity Fair.
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