Just realized the 2019 Lion King remake had a higher budget than the original's total box office run

I was reading some box office numbers on Wikipedia last Tuesday after a boring dinner, and the math blew my mind. The 2019 photo-real remake cost around $260 million to make, but adjusted for inflation the 1994 animated original only made about $422 million worldwide, so the new one's budget was over half of what the classic earned in its entire theatrical run. Yet the remake still felt empty because the animals had no expressions, which kind of defeats the whole point of a cartoon lion. Has anyone else looked at the production costs versus the charm factor and wondered if they just dumped money into a soulless cash grab?

2 comments

2 Comments

abbyg1421d ago

Totally feel you on this one, the numbers just hit different when you actually sit with them. It's wild how they threw all that cash at making it look “real” but forgot the whole heart of the original, which was the characters actually feeling alive. Honestly feels like they paid for fancy tech and lost the soul somewhere in the render farm.

ryanh5618d ago

Lost the soul somewhere in the render farm" is the perfect way to put it. The original lions had more emotion in a single eyebrow raise than the new ones had in the whole movie. They spent all that money on fur physics and forgot that Mufasa's face needs to actually look sad when he dies. It's like buying a 4K TV just to watch static. I'd rather watch the cartoon with blocky pixels than see Simba staring at me like a stuffed animal that's about to do a jump scare.