Skip to main content

Mobile Ads

The Lion King follow-up to be helmed by Moonlight's Barry Jenkins, announces Disney

The Walt Disney Co will make a follow-up to the 2019 live-action The Lion King with Barry Jenkins, the director of the Oscar-winning Moonlight, and the James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk, set to direct.

Disney announced plans Tuesday for a kind of prequel to last year’s poorly reviewed but highly popular photorealistic remake. The new Lion King grossed more than $1.6 billion worldwide, so a sequel was perhaps always likely. Less expected was a Lion King with Jenkins directing. The film, Disney said, will explore the mythology of The Lion King, including Mufasa’s origin story.

“Helping my sister raise two young boys during the ’90s, I grew up with these characters,” Jenkins said in a statement. “Having the opportunity to work with Disney on expanding this magnificent tale of friendship, love, and legacy while furthering my work chronicling the lives and souls of folk within the African diaspora is a dream come true.”

See his post

Jenkins earlier this year completed shooting on the Amazon limited series The Underground Railroad, based on the Colson Whitehead novel. He won an Oscar for the script to the best-picture-winning Moonlight and was nominated for the screenplay to 2018′s If Beale Street Could Talk. He also last year made plans to direct a film based on the life of choreographer Alvin Ailey for Disney’s Searchlight Pictures.

Disney didn’t announce any further plot details or casting on the new Lion King project, which was first reported by Deadline Hollywood. Jeff Nathanson, who wrote the 2019 movie, is returning to pen the follow-up.

Directed by Jon Favreau, The Lion King featured a voice cast including Donald Glover, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Jon Oliver, Billy Eichner, Seth Rogen, and James Earl Jones. Reviews weren’t good (52 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) but it was more lucrative than any other “live-action” remake of a Disney classic. Unadjusted for inflation, 2019′s Lion King ranks as the seventh highest-grossing film ever.

(With inputs from The Associated Press)


by FP Staff

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Watch The Sound with Mark Ronson Apple TV+ explores the curious link between music and technology

In The Salmon of Doubt , Douglas Adams writes: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary, and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary, and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things.” Cut to the world of music. As much as technology has been a driving force in the industry, the advent of any innovation has often been received with skepticism before it goes on to become the norm. Harnessing that interplay between the creative process of making music and the technological enhancement given to said music, is acclaimed DJ and producer Mark Ronson. In his just-released six-part mini-docuseries Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson , he astutely defines how different the process of creating a great

Studying women presidents and prime ministers on screen, from Meryl Streep in Don't Look Up to Dimple Kapadia in A Thursday

In 2016, when I heard Hillary Clinton had lost the US Presidential race to Donald Trump, I took it as a confirmation that this is how much the US hated its women. And I felt temporarily gratified to live in a country which elected a woman as its third prime minister. This was before I remembered Indira Gandhi was the only woman prime minister we have had, and she was an outlier. Her strong and uncompromising leadership style skews meaningful analysis of gender representation in governance. Anyway, for all the breaking of paths and glass ceilings, trailblazers like Gandhi and Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher commonly belong to conservative or traditional parties. Left to the simultaneously imaginative and mimetic art of comedy, the first woman US president looks like Meryl Streep’s Janine Orlean in Don’t Look Up and Julia Louis Dreyfus’ Selina Meyer in the HBO show Veep . They are both are anti-feminists and women of power. Yet they could not be more different in how they reflect the r

Netflix's Lupin acknowledges dangers of fantasies of omnipotence, introducing viewers to a socially conscious gentleman thief

By Emma Bielecki Netflix’s immensely successful new French-language show Lupin has introduced a new generation of anglophone viewers to one of the most popular characters in French popular fiction, Arsène Lupin, gentleman thief. Lupin was created in 1905 by the writer Maurice Leblanc at the behest of publisher Pierre Lafitte, who had recently launched a general interest magazine, Je Sais Tout . Lafitte wanted a serial that would guarantee a loyal readership for his magazine, as the Sherlock Holmes stories had for the Strand Magazine. Drawing inspiration from Conan Doyle and EW Hornung’s Raffles stories, Leblanc obliged by creating a flamboyant and ultimately always benign trickster figure. Cat burglar, con artist, master of disguise, Lupin is also a brilliant detective and righter of wrongs. His appeal has proved enduring: in addition to the original 20 volumes of stories authored by Leblanc, there have been countless plays, radio shows, TV series and films, from Italian pornos