The Godfather: Part II has gone down in history as the best possible exponent of a very curious approach when it comes to continuing a box office success: dedicating a sequel to it that is at the same time sequel and prequel. So we could continue with the story of Michael Corleone in parallel to recreating the years of his father’s youth Vitusand this turns out to be the approach of… The Lion King: Mufasa. This is the title of an upcoming film with which Disney wants to make the most of the box office success it generated. The Lion King of 2019, when Jon Favreau led a remake with hyper-realistic CGI from the animated classic of the same name.
What do you intend to do The Lion King: Mufasa? Well, follow the steps of Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo to contrast Simba’s reign with the formation of his father Mufasa, who died as we all know during the filming of The Lion King. As if this weren’t quaint enough, it turns out that Disney has commissioned him to direct the film (again with state-of-the-art digital effects for what is still animation, nothing of the sort. live action) to someone like Barry Jenkins. Director of the award-winning moonlight and other intimate dramas such as The Beale Street Blues or the series The underground railway.
Well, Jenkins is a director from independent cinema, so his presence at the helm of Mufasa It’s quite shocking. Even so, the film has been in production for some time, and this very week during the Las Vegas CinemaCon Disney has shown a first trailer. He did it in the company of Jenkins, who came to present the film to the public and the first thing he did was assure that he did not regret having accepted the commission. He went further, he said that directing Mufasa had been “one of the best decisions I have made in my life.”
He also confessed that the film was “very personal” for him, because The Lion King The original from the ’90s was a film he had seen countless times with his young nephews (more than 200, he said). Jenkins also directly addressed the change in record that Mufasa represents for his previous career, saying that moonlight it was one “small movie with a big heart” while Mufasa is something very different.
“This is a movie fucking huge, and my job is to give him a huge heart,” he concluded. In Mufasa the protagonist in his youth version will have the voice of Aaron Pierrewhile his brother Scar will speak as Kelvin Harrison Jr.. His story will be recalled from a present where Simba has become the new king of the Savannah, without it being very clear if he will adapt any element of the animated sequel to The Lion King released on video at the time: the one according to which Simba had a daughter, called Kiara.
The Lion King: Mufasa will be released by Disney next December 20th.
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