The Lion King (2019) Reviews - 53/100 Metacritic| 58% RT

As expected, mixed reviews. Besides The Jungle Book (I haven't seen Pete's Dragon yet), none of these live-action remakes impressed me in any way. They're just cash grabs and even though I don't want to actively root for a movie to fail, I will say that I won't be upset if this flops at the box-office. Disney can do so much more than this, we (or at least I) don't want shot for shot mediocre remakes of their classic movies. I saw a clip of the movie yesterday and it looked pretty bad. Of course the photorealistic effects are impressive, but the lip syncing/singing effect looks really off and there's no emotion in the characters at all. It's like they took a nature doc video and added a song to it as a meme for fun.

Ugh this hurts to hear. I really thought Faverau would have nailed this after Jungle book, but I can’t say i’m surprised. All he could keep talking about in behind the scenes videos were how awesome it looked and that was it.

Seriously where did the remakes go wrong?

Regardless of what we think of it, it's going to make money and that's all that matters in the end to Disney. Nostalgia sells.

Aladdin has a 57% RT score and it's making plenty of money. RT's a joke.

Pete's Dragon is pretty good IMO.

You might have hit the nail on the head there with all the talk about the visuals.  Style over substance.

Anybody seen it yet? How bad is it?

Just got back home from it and it's really not very good. It pale's in comparison to the original in every aspect of it. The acting is worse, the music is worse, the action is worse. Worst of all, this one really felt like it lacked heart or soul to it. Just came off as a blatant copy and paste of the original outside of a VERY few differences.

Here were the few differences that this film had to offer:

The "Can't Wait to be King" song obviously plays out differently as you're not getting animals standing on top of each other and so on.

The Hyena's play out differently as the "Edd" character now just doesn't know what personal space is.

We see that Scar apparently had a thing for Sarabi but she chose Mufasa so when Scar becomes King he's trying to convince her to be his Queen.

We see a scene where Nala sneaks away from Pride Rock.

We see Nala attacking Pumba play out a bit differently as Pumba doesn't get stuck under a branch instead he gets caught because he couldn't climb up a hill/rock.

The "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" scene doesn't play out quite the same. No Simba swinging into the water or Nala "do me" eyes. Obviously as this isn't so much animated.

We see a whole scene play out of how Simba's fur gets to Rafiki letting him know Simba is alive. Yeah, it's basically a Giraffe eats the fur off a leaf and then we see a Dung Beetle pushing it's shit. Literally this scene didn't even need to be in the film. But it is a difference.

Get an extra song in there for Nala as she and Simba return ya know, because Beyoncé.

The final fight doesn't quite play out the same. We get a forced Shenzi/Nala confrontation as if they've been lifelong rivals when in reality it was just Shenzi tried to eat her once at the Elephant Graveyard. Originally I thought it was Shenzi and Sarabi but then Beyoncé spoke. Again, feels like just added content because it's Beyoncé.

That's pretty much it. Just little things here and there and added Beyoncé content that make the difference from it being a shot for shot remake. Otherwise it pretty much is. None of these differences made the film any better. Most of which imo made it worse. Specially the added Beyoncé content which is quite clear it's added simply because who the "actress" is. I put actress in quotes because it's time that we all agree, that while Beyoncé is a good singer she can't act. All her lines are as if she's doing the bare minimum of reading them off a page. The rest of the voice cast is okay (James Earl Jones excluded because he's still great) but they don't compare to the original while Beyoncé straight up is just the weakest link imo.

I'd give it like a 4.5 out of 10. It's really not worth anybody's money to go see. Just watch the original instead. Hell, I'd even recommend Lion King 2: Simba's Pride over this one. It even has better music. I say this while knowing the original's music is far better than the sequel, the performance's of those songs in this film just don't even compare leaving me say Simba's Pride had better music.

I saw about 15 minutes of it, i could't make it further