My Lion King Forum

This is a personal curiosity of mine, and MLK is as good of a place to ask the question as any: Now that we're into the release month, how good do you think the new remake will be?

Obviously, you lot here on MLK are a biased bunch when it comes to all things related to The Lion King. So asking "do you think the remake will be any good?" is a rather stupid question to ask. So let's rephrase the question: Do you think it will be any good compared to the original 1994 movie?

For example, my personal opinion is that while I expect to go in to watch the remake, I will be in for a very unexpected shock if I will not end up enjoying watching the movie. I fully expect the movie to be good. But at the same time: the original is a classic. So will the remake be actually a better movie? I highly doubt it. So my vote goes to... I expect the remake to be somewhat worse than the original.

This is clearly a topic on which I wish to be wrong, unfortunately I really can´t see much room for improvement beyhond the original material. It´s a "wait to see" matter.

I voted that the remake would be somewhat worse than the original, but I do also hope that I'm wrong. I know for sure that the photorealistic CGI and the voice cast will be praised, but the original film is an irreplaceable classic in my heart. The magic from that film just can't be repeated.

My expectations really aren't super high. It will probably be okay. I don't expect it to flop or anything, but it has a really high bar to live up to.

Perhaps this is just me being overly optimistic after seeing the newest TV spots and the behind-the-scenes featurette, but based on everything I know and have watched, I actually kinda think that I'll find this to be the overall better movie when everything's taken into account -- although I will add the condition that its success depends on whether the new elements they're adding work together well. The original film is of course great and will always be so, but I do see areas of potential improvement and expansion on the story itself that could really add a lot -- definitely giving the lionesses more shine at the very least -- so if those new elements that we know are coming in this film work well to rectify and build upon the original, it's an automatic win over the 1994 version in my book. Everything else (voice acting, the way the characters express emotion, the music) is largely a matter of executing the material they have well enough for me to just consider this an equally-as-good different take.

To elaborate a bit; to the elephant in the room, I'm really unfazed by the new animation style; I really just see this as a different medium of storytelling and actually really like animal-related CGI, so I really appreciate the work and artistry that's gone into the film's look and I'm not fussed with comparing it to the cartoon style. (Could they have gone further with some of the lions' designs while still being realistic? Yes, but what they have now does work for me.) In lieu of human-level expressive faces, as long as the voice acting and body language well enough conveys the characters' emotion, it'll work for me such that I won't find it better, just different.

I'm also ambivalent about casting differences, though admittedly I do like this cast a slight bit more than the original lineup because it's got a bit more of an Afrocentric angle -- though they really should've gone the whole nine yards and casted East African actors so that the characters can actually sound like they're from the region they're in -- plus it's just better when a character's singing and speaking voices actually match up. (The jump between Johnathan Taylor Thomas and Jason Weaver was always jarring to me.) On that note (pun intended), music-wise, it's really gonna be a song-by-song matter of better, worse, or different for me; it's actually the wild card in all of this.

I have a feeling I'll see it as being equally good as the original, though likely for different reasons. Things I prefer from the original, things I prefer from the remake. But hey, nothing wrong with that happening.

[quote="TLK_Kid"]I have a feeling I'll see it as being equally good as the original, though likely for different reasons. Things I prefer from the original, things I prefer from the remake. But hey, nothing wrong with that happening.[/quote]
Exactly! As Uncle Phil once said, it's possible to like both classical music and James Brown.