Ron Howard, director of Rush and Frost/Nixon, has signed up to direct and produce Warner Bros' forthcoming live action take on the Jungle Book. He replaces Babel director Alejandro González Iñárritu on the project.

As is so common in Hollywood, it will compete with another similar project also in the works, a live action version from Disney that will have Jon Favreau in the director's chair. However, it could be some time before Howard's version is begun, as he has a number of other projects in the offing. One is to direct Inferno, the follow-up to his pair of Dan Brown adaptations, The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons; he may also work on The Graveyard Book, a Disney adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novel of the same name.

It was announced last week that Howard would also produce Chinese director Zhang Yimou's first western movie, an adaptation of Robert Ludlum's novel The Parsifal Mosaic. At the Bafta awards at the weekend, he accepted the award for editing on behalf of his absent Rush editors, saying jokingly: "I think they'd thank the hell out me. There could have been tears - who the hell knows?"

The Jungle Book, written by Rudyard Kipling, is most famous on screen in its 1967 animated Disney incarnation, but live action versions were also made in 1942 and 1994.