If directors and films were matched up via some sort of odd Hollywood dating service – and who says they’re not? – then the combo of Tim Burton and 20th Fox’s adaptation of Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children would have the compatibility meters blinking with joy.

The studio and Chernin Entertainment nabbed the rights to Ransom Riggs’ novel earlier in the year, and the story sounds like it was made for Burton to bring to the screen. The hero is 16-year-old Jacob, who has grown up hearing tales of the titular orphanage’s odd residents from his grandfather. They included a girl who always floated slightly off the ground, another who could safely hold fire in her hands and twins who had a psychic connection.

When granddad suddenly dies, leaving behind a message for his grandson, Jacob makes the trip to the ancestral home on a strange island off the coast of Wales. There he also finds the remains of Miss Peregrine’s place and discovers that some of those who lived there might not have left. And that they were confined because they posed a real danger…

If Burton does agree to develop the film, he’ll be looking for a writer and then working on a way to have Johnny Depp play Jacob via performance capture. All right, not so much on that last one.

But any forward motion on the project will have to wait a little while: the director is busy finishing Dark Shadows and overseeing the final stages of bringing his old short Frankenweenie back to life as a full length stop-motion ‘toon.