Return Of The King

A legacy can be a beast, whether it’s for a young lion prince walking in his father’s footsteps or a filmmaking team reimagining one of the most treasured animated movies of all time. Step inside director Jon Favreau's the lion king, the wildest Disney remake this side of the savannah.

- Marc Snetiker

The elephant in the room is that there’s no elephant in the room. Or a lion, hyena, or zebra, for that matter. In fact, it’s quite possible there are no indigenous African animals anywhere whatsoever within a 25-mile radius of this Playa Vista, Calif., production facility. And yet there are roars and squawks and grunts and growls sounding out from all corners of this secluded little studio, and if a visiting tourist knows where to look, they may even spot a majestic creature up on screen with fur so fine, skin so textured, and eyes so exquisitely piercing that they’d bet their kingdom the animal was real.

The blurriness of reality has never looked sharper than in Disney’s July 19 tentpole The Lion King, a summer blockbuster-in-the-making (again!) that refreshes a classic movie with a pioneering photo-real animation technology for a film experience that will be, simply, wild. As the latest animated Disney film to be reimagined for new audiences (in a string of “live-action” remakes that has earned more than $5 billion since 2010), The Lion King has had the Hollywood herd on high alert since the studio first announced its intent three years ago to remake the 1994 cartoon epic with Jon Favreau directing. The filmmaker’s photo-realistic adaptation of The Jungle Book wowed audiences in 2016, using cutting-edge tools to bring exotic animals to astonishing animated life (a technology Favreau’s team has only further developed since). But even Favreau would tell you: The jungle and the savannah are two vastly different beasts, and no beast roars louder than The Lion King.