What’s the goal of a live-action Lion King?
Is it to pay some voice actors? I could be OK with that, sure. But there’s no real challenge here, is there? You could shoot the new movie so that it was shot-for-shot identical with the animated Lion King, and there’s more than a hint in this trailer that they did precisely that. What is Disney’s overriding goal here, and is it more hallowed than “I wanna sell some tickets?”
Moe Lane
PS: I should note that I will most likely see the live-action Mulan when it comes out, because Mulan was awesome and so was her movie. So it may be that I am simply not engaged in The Lion King enough to be pumped for this version. I don’t know. Still.
There must be an executive at Disney who’s all about turning every animated franchise into a live show: I mean, this is far less of a stretch than DUMBO for crying out loud. To be fair, 2D animation is fast being forgotten as a motion picture medium, and reexamining the space with the latest CGI is not entirely a bad idea.
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That being said, it’s The Mouse. Of COURSE it’s “I wanna sell more tickets.”
It can also be a way to basically renew a copyright on their property. Wwhich can be an issue for a movie like Dumbo, which is coming up on 80 years since its original release, and even the original Lion King is 25 years ago now.
It’s not a copyright thing. It’s been noted that the lifetime of copyrights in the US gets extended whenever Disney’s oldest copyrights are about to expire…
And stuff like ‘Lion King’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is *significantly* younger than ‘Steamboat Willie’ and ‘Snow White’. So far as I’m aware, the oldest Disney animated movie that they turned into a live-action production was ‘Cinderella’.