The Lion King *Is* A Cash Grab, So What?
Like many, I found The Lion King (2019) to be unnecessary and pointless, a blatant cash grab. In my own review, I called it a film that only fulfilled the business side of film making and none of the creatives. Now that the film has been out for awhile, and with film internet turning their attention to Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and Hobbs and Shaw (kind of) pulling the general audience’s attentions away, I decided to revisit the film and think of it from a different perspective. After all, the film has crossed the $1 billion worldwide box office mark and with an A Cinemascore, it clearly did not disappoint many who went to see it.
I won’t go into detail on how the film could have worked better, there’s already countless of articles and videos about that and the film’s supposed failings. For the purpose of this article, I asked a few of my friends who have seen the film for their opinions and I could generalise it all as “I really enjoyed it”. Many had not seen the original in years, even though it was a big part of our childhoods, and revisiting the film as we enter adulthood clearly pushed a lot of nostalgia buttons. In fact, the similarities to the original helped me enjoy the film a lot more than I had anticipated. Though a common refrain is that the lack of emotions on the animals is a little hard to get over.
