Disney is in full swing with live action adaptations of their animated classics, with
Beauty and the Beast due for release in March, along with plans for
The Lion King,
Mulan, and
The Little Mermaid. Director Jon Favreau, who helmed this summer's near-billion dollar hit remake of
The Jungle Book, has also signed on to direct the retelling of
The Lion King, which he plans to make after he concludes production on a
Jungle Book sequel.
Favreau confirmed with
Collider that his plan is to tackle
The Lion King directly after finishing
The Jungle Book 2, but admitted that the exhausting schedule could affect things, much like his time working with Marvel Studios on the first two
Iron Man films.
“Right now the plan is that we go right from one to the other, but I know from having worked on two superhero movies back to back, these take many, many, many years. I was working on Marvel movies for like four years back-to-back. It’s a big chunk of your life and you have to make sure that you’re excited and can bring all of your attention and concentration to bear on this, because they are really big puzzles. Every film is a puzzle you have to solve—these highly technical ones are like 3D chess.”
The director admitted that the challenge in remaking
The Lion King was steep, as the original animated classic holds up so well, along with having been adapted as a theatre musical.
"With Lion King, there you have such a strong original film, and then there was a theater production of it as well in a different medium that was very well received and successful and still continues to play. And you have a lot of people with very deep memories and connections to those properties so you want to make sure that, even though the story is very strong, you want to make sure it translates well to yet another medium and doesn’t feel like it’s duplicating or trying to outdo what was done in another medium.
"
Disney has also been touting these remakes as "live-action";
The Jungle Book had a human anchor in Mowgli, along with some actual on-set props and substitutes for the animals.
The Lion King, on the other hand, will rely almost entirely on CGI and 3D imagery.
"So the trick," Favreau said,
"is can you make it look like you actually found real animals in a real environment? And how do you translate the story through that? And in that sense, what we learned on Jungle Book as we got into the photorealism of the environments and the characters, the behavior of the animals, how do you use the lessons you learned there, but adjust it to the tone of what Lion King is? Because I think that when you hear the opening song, when you see those images, the photography of it, even in 2D it is arresting, and I try to imagine what it could be like using the tools that we have today and could we make audiences feel the same way and retell the same myth using these new tools?"
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