The Lion King’ Announces Streaming Premiere Date

Disney’s Mufasa, the latest installment in its enduringly popular Lion King franchise, is headed to streaming.

The new movie is both a sequel and a prequel to 2019’s The Lion King, a “live-action” remake of the venerable 1994 cartoon. The 2019 Lion King, directed by Jon Favreau, retold much the same story as the first film, but with photorealistic animals in the place of hand-drawn characters.

Mufasa, directed by Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins, features a frame story set after the events of The Lion King, in which Simba’s daughter (voiced by Blue Ivy Carter) learns the story of her grandfather Mufasa, and how he came to be the ruler of the Pride Lands.

The young versions of Mufasa and Scar are voiced in Mufasa by Aaron Pierre and Kelvin Harrison Jr. The frame story features Donald Glover, John Kani, Seth Rogen, Billy Eichner, and Beyonce, all reprising their roles from The Lion King as Simba, Rafiki, Pumbaa, Timon, and Nala, respectively. (Don’t go in expecting much from Beyonce, though; she barely has a handful of lines in this one.)

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Although Mufasa only received so-so reviews (it’s currently rated “rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes with a score of 57 percent), and opened in theaters with an underwhelming $35 million opening weekend gross, it stuck around in multiplexes long enough to become a hit. It ultimately earned $712 million worldwide, a respectable number for a prequel — although that’s still less than half of the $1.66 billion 2019’s Lion King made.

I thought Mufasa was a marginal improvement over the first live-action Lion King movie. But the fundamental issue with that film still persists here. As I wrote in my review here at ScreenCrush…

This fictional universe was designed to be inhabited by hand-drawn, highly stylized Disney characters with exaggerated emotions and gestures. When you populate it with quasi-realistic animals, they can’t do anything too obviously anthropomorphic, the way Disney animated heroes so often can and do in their classic films, lest you break the illusion. Instead, the characters in Mufasa just walk around constantly, and Jenkins’ camera swoops and circles around them in this perpetual state of manic motion.

Still if you missed Mufasa in theaters but were curious to check it out, streaming is probably the way to go, especially if you already have a Disney+ subscription. The movie is set to premiere on Disney+ on March 26.

Sign up for Disney+ here.