Hamlet’s first lion-based prequel has arrived in cinemas with less of a roar and more a meow – what the heck happened?
A prequel to the highest-grossing animated film of all time came out the weekend before Christmas, and it’s entirely possible you didn’t notice.
Not that Mufasa: The Lion King’s advertising campaign has been invisible. It’s not even been that small, in the grand scheme of things – any film which can get its name plastered on the side of a UK bus almost by definition has one of the 50 biggest marketing budgets of the year.
What it hasn’t been, though, is all-encompassing. Compared to Wicked, which Universal plugged with record-breaking numbers of brand partnerships and enough green paint to turn your average urban metropolis into the Emerald City, or Deadpool & Wolverine, which saw Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman set into a permanent crouch on every social media feed on the planet, Mufasa feels positively restrained (to me, anyway; if Disney has filled your TikTok feed with digital mandrills and turned your street into a safari park, I can only apologise).
Assuming such things are directly correlated, this more muted marketing campaign seems to be bearing fruit. According to Deadline, the Lion King prequel’s $35m domestic opening is down 82% on its 2019 predecessor. To quote the same outlet: “these are Joker: Folie a Deux numbers”.
But I’ve been re-watching The Holiday, and the nice old man (Eli Wallach) has reminded us all that judging a film by its opening weekend is very silly. Box office takings, of course, aren’t everything; the stranger thing about Mufasa’s release is that it doesn’t feel more like a cultural moment. The Lion King franchise is one of the most significant cultural institutions of the century – the 1994 film is universally beloved, the stage musical is Broadway’s highest-grossing production of all time, and the 2019 remake was a colossus in its own right. Even if the newest entry does the accounting equivalent of a backflip and makes a billion dollars by the end of its run in cinemas, there doesn’t seem to be a sense, either from critics or audiences, that the film is much more than the latest in a string of IP monetisations (we actually thought it was perfectly alright, but that’s by-the-by).
In some indescribable little way, it just doesn’t feel very ‘special’. And now more than ever, isn’t ‘special’ what we turn to movies for? Remember when, as a child, every trip to the cinema felt like a huge deal? When your favourite film was always the last one you happened to see, because these sounds, these colours and these stories were truly like nothing you had ever seen?
As an adult, some movies do their best to capture that feeling. Those films, whether they end up being good or bad, that everyone seems excited to see. As the big screen loses some of the attention monopoly it once held, the idea of event cinema gets rarer and rarer, but examples crop up every now and then: Wicked from this year, or Barbie and Oppenheimer from 2023. Those films that, even while watching them with a packed house on opening weekend, you can already feel lasting the test of time.
Read more: Superman trailer | Has James Gunn secretly made a team-up film?
It’s the difference, really, between a film being a blockbuster versus an event. Historically, this is what Hollywood has always done so well: the biggest stars, the biggest budget, the biggest screen. It’s the reason why it’s easy to get so excited by box office figures – a huge part of the appeal of blockbuster cinema is how, well, huge it feels, how magnificent that so much time, effort and money went into entertainment on such a massive scale.
Mufasa: The Lion King, with a budget somewhere in the region of $200m, should be a part of that tradition. It’s a prequel to what is basically a foundational text for at least two generations (or more, if we’re assuming the new film also works as a precursor to Hamlet). There’s no reason it shouldn’t be, to slip into trailer-speak for a second, “the movie event of the year”.
And yet between modest box office expectations, middling reviews and what feels like a palpable lack of hype, Mufasa doesn’t look like event cinema at all. I’m not entirely sure why that is: has Disney’s marketing failed to find an audience? Has the public grown tired of another trip to the IP mine? Or are they just sick of CGI lions?
All of the above could be true. Or I could be completely wrong; we could march into 2025 as the world explodes with Mufasa-mania, piling into cinemas dressed as their favourite CGI animal.
But, at the moment, it doesn’t feel like that’s the case. It feels like Mufasa is being put out into the world like the latest content widget from a corporate conveyer belt – and that just feels sad.
Mufasa: The Lion King is in cinemas now.
