1.6 billion was how much Lion King 2019 made.
260 million dollars was the budget.
6.1x box office to budget.

968 million was the box office for Lion King 1994.
45 million was the budget.
21.5x box office to budget.

This is also not factoring in inflation, where the Lion King’s actual box office total would be about 2 billion today, meaning the movie made 400 million more than the 2019 reboot.

Disney just announced they’ll be making a prequel to the 2019 Lion King, called ”Mufasa”

It’ll continue to CGI style used in 2019, tell an original story and could possibly be the last time James Earl Jones does a voice lead in a movie or the first time his voice is done with CGI for an entire film.

The only question is, can this live up to the success the Lion King has had so far at the box office?

First up, some history on Lion King sequels.

The Lion King 2 came out in 1998, but not in theaters and as a VHS film.

The VHS had lifetime sales of 464 million dollars, 300 million of that being in the first twelve months.

So much of a hit, the Lion King 1 1/2 came out in 2004, this time as more of a parody to the original film.

Even as a fairly strange idea, it sold over 150 million in DVD’s.

This isn’t shocking, seeing how the Lion King 1994 is the highest selling VHS ever, selling 55 million copies and 520 million in sales. Blockbuster also said it consistently was in the top ten for most rented kids movies from the pointment it was available to when Blockbuster closed.

The Lion King had hits with the sequels, which would make sense the 2019 movie should also do a sequel, but there’s a problem with that and that’s point two.

Second point, Disney live action sequels.

Alice in Wonderland 2010-1 billion dollars
Maleficent-758 million
Jungle Book-966 million
Beauty and the Beast-1.2 billion
Aladdin-1 billion

Almost every Disney 2D animated film which has been converted to live action has made a massive amount of money.

The problem though is the sequels haven’t.

Maleficent 2 had a major box office drop, making 492 million.
Alice in Wonderland 2 was even worse, making 299 million, for a 700+ million dollar drop.

The success of Disney live action reboots seems to work the first try, but the moment it gets expanded, things fall apart.

The Lion King is a bigger title, but the 2019 film failed with critics, getting only a 52%, versus the 93% the original had.

It’s not a sure thing the prequel will do as well as 2019 did.

This brings up the question, is there a better option for the Lion King?

15.4 billion is the lifetime earnings of the Lion King franchise.

8.2 billion of that came from the Lion King on Broadway, which has made nearly 3x all the films combined.

It’s become one of the default things tourist do visiting NYC and has created an entire merchandise line centered around it, which does as well as the movies.

Idea here

Disney spent 75 million getting the rights to Hamilton, which they put on Disney+ and 2.7 million households streamed it in the first 24 hours.

Instead of focusing as hard on doing a 200-300 million dollar movie, which might be higher risk, they should focus on doing prequels and spinoffs in theater form and releasing them on Disney+.

Benefit is it’ll be extremely cheap content for Disney+, where the Lion King on Broadway had an initial cost of only 20 million to setup. This is less than 10% of what they’d expect to spend on a prequel to the 2019 movie.

The next benefit is it builds Lion King IP value, where if there were spinoffs, prequels and sequels available on Disney+, it’d make people more likely to see the play if ever in NYC or somewhere it’s touring.

Final benefit, it tests the waters.

There’s no real proof there’s a market for Mufasa. My guess the entire reason they went with that idea was they didn’t want to get backlash for changing the canon of the Lion King 2, but didn’t think it was strong enough to do a reboot of.

Just a random thought, but feels like a safer move over dumping 200-300 million into something which probably makes less than the 2019 film.