What's new

The Lion King (2019) (1 Viewer)

Jake Lipson

Premium
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 21, 2002
Messages
24,442
Real Name
Jake Lipson
If that is the version that is in the movie proper then it will stick out like a sore thumb.

I think it is. Although it will also be included on her companion album, I don't have the impression that she actually recorded it twice.

Personally, I'm not going to listen to the soundtrack ahead of time, other than the brief sections that I've already heard in trailers and the like. I feel like I already know so much about what this movie is that if I listen to the songs ahead of time, then there won't really be anything left that's new. Hearing the new interpretations of the songs for the first time in the context of the movie itself is something that I have to look forward to with this one; if I just listen to the soundtrack now, then I'm minimizing that impact. So I'll wait.
 

Jake Lipson

Premium
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 21, 2002
Messages
24,442
Real Name
Jake Lipson
Lion King wasn’t built to break an advance sale record. It was built so that a family audience could walk up to the box office and know that it was a safe bet. I’m sure Disney will take any advance sales they can get but that’s not the business model for this film.

Point taken, and you're right. In particular with this movie, spoilers are essentially impossible because it is following the original so closely and you'd be hard-pressed to find a movie fan (except maybe very young children) who hasn't seen it. However, personally, if we're talking about the opening Thursday night of a big movie -- especially if I'm going in the XD format with the reserved seating room -- I like to get the ticket as early as possible so I know I have what I want. (But then again, I also need the wheelchair row so have less options than you do.)

Incidentally, I got bored and decided to look up the theater in my college town in the midwest where I went to school. They really are a college town in every sense of the phrase -- the city website lists Wal-Mart as a tourist attraction since there's literally nothing else there except the school. They have an IMAX now, which wasn't there when I was there but is surely one of the smaller "fake" ones since it's built into their only 12-screen AMC, which is the only theater in town. When I clicked on the link for their first showtime of TLK in the IMAX at 6pm on Thursday, I did a double take. Almost the entire auditorium, with the exception of the wheelchair row and the very front row, is sold. There are only a few scattered seats available otherwise. This doesn't really affect me because I don't live anywhere near there anymore and won't be going there to see it, but I was shocked at the size of the advance sale. I guess there are a lot of Lion King diehards there. I certainly had one of the posters for the original movie in my dorm during my stay there.
 
Last edited:

Jake Lipson

Premium
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 21, 2002
Messages
24,442
Real Name
Jake Lipson




Also, there will be a behind-the-scenes special on ABC next Tuesday night called "The Lion King: Can You Feel the Love Tonight with Robin Roberts." They are going to show the entire Can You Feel the Love Tonight scene -- which I don't want to see until the movie -- along with interviews and making-of footage, which I do want to see. I'll set my DVR to record it and will watch it after I see the movie. Whoopi Goldberg (who of course voiced Shenzi in the original) is interviewed as well, so that will be fun, especially if she tells stories about the making of the original.
 

Chris Will

Screenwriter
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
1,933
Location
Montgomery, AL
Real Name
Chris WIlliams
https://www.dvdizzy.com/lionking-2019-film.html

If they similarly pad out every scene in the way that Luke's review describes, it shouldn't be too hard to squeeze an extra half hour out of the story without actually changing it all that much.

So, it’s possibly 30 minutes of padding? That seems like a horrible decision and just shows how editing is becoming a lost art in mainstream movies. Normally you would try to trim the fat to make the movie as tight as possible but, here they decide to tell an 88 minute story in 120 minutes. You would think that Disney would have preferred an 88 minute movie so they could squeeze a few more showtimes in each day.

Man, I was really pumped for this movie before the reviews came out, now I’m very discouraged. After watching a few of the new clips that have been released over the last few days, I don’t like how the animals show very little emotion in their face. It just looks odd. I don’t get it because Babe had emotional animals 24 years ago. Still going to see it of course, I’m just not as excited.
 

Mikael Soderholm

Screenwriter
Joined
Apr 5, 1999
Messages
1,121
Location
Stockholm, SWEDEN
Real Name
Mikael Söderholm
Listened to the soundtrack last night. Underwhelmed. In fact, I just bought the original on CD, because I listened to it after then new one, and realized 1) how good it was and 2) that I didn't have it.

And as to spoilers, I'm with George Lucas here, talking to Steven Spielberg about potential spoilers for Indy 4:

And to that I say, ”Steven, it doesn’t make any difference!” Look – Jaws was a novel before it was a movie, and anybody could see how it ended. Didn’t matter.
http://www.slashfilm.com/steven-spielberg-and-george-lucas-talk-about-internet-spoilers/

There are only so many stories, the thing is how thay are told. Any movie relying on a twist will get old real quick, while one relying on a good story will never get old.

Don't you ever rewatch 'spoiled' movies, or are they spoiled forever? I knew the twist to 6th Sense before I saw it, and I thought it was great, because it wasn't the twist that made it great.

But come Monday, thanks to my daughter, who works at Disney in Sweden, we are invitetd to the gala showing of the Lion King in Stockholm, can't wait.
 

Jake Lipson

Premium
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 21, 2002
Messages
24,442
Real Name
Jake Lipson
You would think that Disney would have preferred an 88 minute movie so they could squeeze a few more showtimes in each day.

But then it really would be completely shot-for-shot and they wouldn't have anything to point to and say, "Look, that's new!"

I don’t like how the animals show very little emotion in their face.

Real animals usually can't show that much emotion in their face. It's a side-effect of the decision to make this as photorealistic as possible.

I don’t get it because Babe had emotional animals 24 years ago.

Babe was a whimsical story and was not attempting to be as close to photoreal as this is. It's a style choice.
 

Jake Lipson

Premium
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 21, 2002
Messages
24,442
Real Name
Jake Lipson
My theater has now finalized additional showtimes for Thursday that weren't up before and has the movie starting once just about every 15 minutes or so from 6:00pm to 11:30pm, with 20 showtimes total for the evening. It might not be selling a huge number of advance tickets, but I think they are preparing for a huge opening regardless. They obviously want people to be able to walk up to the box office and buy tickets without any fear of having to wait long for the next show to start. Only the XD room where I'm seeing it has reserved seating so I can't see how the other ones are selling, but based on the amount of showtimes available, it seems like they are preparing for this to be a big opening night draw.
 
Last edited:

Jake Lipson

Premium
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 21, 2002
Messages
24,442
Real Name
Jake Lipson
Think I’m gonna pass on this one.

I get that -- but I feel like I want to know what has been done to it simply because I love the original so much. It's not so much that I feel as though a remake was necessary at all, but since they did it, I want to know what they did. I can't have a fully formed valid opinion of it without seeing it.

But I wouldn't exactly say I'm excited for it, either. They could be doing a re-release of the original movie again like they did in 2011 and I would be equally as excited for that (if not moreso) than I am for the remake. I hope it's good -- I really do -- but we'll see what happens. I'm sure at the very least that Favreau will have made something that is technically sound. Whether it ends up being more than a curiosity is another question.
 
Last edited:

holtge

Screenwriter
Joined
Jul 14, 2018
Messages
1,557
Location
Idaho Falls, Idaho
Real Name
Gordon Holt
Man, I was really pumped for this movie before the reviews came out, now I’m very discouraged. After watching a few of the new clips that have been released over the last few days, I don’t like how the animals show very little emotion in their face. It just looks odd. I don’t get it because Babe had emotional animals 24 years ago. Still going to see it of course, I’m just not as excited.

I would have to say I agree. My opinion of this film has changed dramatically in the last week or so. What I thought would be a marvel of storytelling seems to be a complete rehash of the original. I'll still see it as well, but likely wait a few days so I don't have to fight the crowds.

It's unfortunate too, because I think the filmmakers could have taken some creative license here without deviating from the original storyline, just like Aladdin and Dumbo did earlier this year. Missed opportunity for sure.
 

Jake Lipson

Premium
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 21, 2002
Messages
24,442
Real Name
Jake Lipson
What I thought would be a marvel of storytelling seems to be a complete rehash of the original.

Personally, I never really expected this to be anything else. The message behind every piece of marketing has been, "It's exactly the Lion King you remember." If nothing else, they're going to deliver what they advertised.

It's unfortunate too, because I think the filmmakers could have taken some creative license here without deviating from the original storyline, just like Aladdin and Dumbo did earlier this year. Missed opportunity for sure.

Obviously, we disagree on Aladdin and we've had that discussion and that's fine. But I think there are a couple key differences between Aladdin and The Lion King, or even between Favreau's Jungle Book (which I liked very much) and The Lion King.

Aladdin actually has live-action elements in it because the principal characters are human (or, in the case of Genie, can be made to appear human.) So, while it involves a large amount of CGI visual effects, the fact that there are human actors on screen in the primary roles instantly differentiates it from what was done in the animated film.

With The Lion King, you simply don't have that element because there are no human characters, so as much as you can render it to look realistic, it's still an animated film.

The Jungle Book was largely that too (with the exception of the presence of Neal Sethi as Mowgli.) But there's a source novel for The Jungle Book and there have been multiple different versions of it made through the years. That gave Favreau the freedom to retone it; the '67 film is a very loosely-structured, highly episodic comedy musical. Favreau made his much more of an action-adventure film with a stronger narrative through-line connecting the various scenes together.

But The Lion King doesn't need to be retoned, because it is already perfect and doesn't have a history of different versions. Because the original film is the only version of it that has existed for a quarter century, it demands a different level of fidelity than The Jungle Book does; even the Broadway musical added songs and moments, but didn't really change the bones of what the story is. There are way more elements of Lion King that people would be upset if you messed with than was the case with Jungle Book. So if you can't retone it, and you don't have live-action elements in there to distinguish it from the original, then, really, what's left other than to update the tech? I would have added the songs from the Broadway musical, which would have clearly distinguished this version to borrow more from the stage production, but they decided not to do that.

I saw a review that suggested that the inclusion of the musical numbers is at odds with the photo-realism and the more naturalistic approach might have benefited from losing them -- but the reviewer acknowledged that they had to keep the songs because fans would revolt if the songs weren't in it, which is pretty much right on the money.

It's something where pretty much the entire audience (with the possible exception of the very youngest of young children) are going to come in with preconceived notions of what the movie has to be, because everyone has seen the original film and is so attached to it. Mess with it too much and the fans won't support it. Do too little and it seems unnecessary -- which of course it is, because there's nothing that needs to be changed about the original.

I'm curious to see this and I hope I enjoy it. I wouldn't go if I thought I was going to dislike it. But I would be just as happy to go to the theater on Thursday night and see the original movie again if this were another re-release like in 2002 and 2011. But, of course, the new version will make more money than a re-release would, which is why they made it.

All that being said, my reserved seating Cinemark XD screening on Thursday night has already sold more tickets in advance than were sold for the entire first screening of Aladdin in the same room, including walk-up business. So it certainly looks like it's going to get off to a good start.
 
Last edited:

Jake Lipson

Premium
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 21, 2002
Messages
24,442
Real Name
Jake Lipson
For anybody who is planning to see The Lion King in 3D with a group, Atom Tickets is holding a promotion where if you buy between 4 and 10 tickets to any 3D showing, they'll knock off the 3D upcharge so you get the tickets for the price of 2D tickets.

This isn't relevant to me, but I know some of you are big 3D fans, so here you go. Details at https://www.atomtickets.com/promotions/.
 

Jake Lipson

Premium
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 21, 2002
Messages
24,442
Real Name
Jake Lipson
This is unusual. For "select" musical sequences in the movie, the aspect ratio will expand for IMAX -- but, apparently, only a handful of IMAX theaters are getting the shifting ratio version of the movie, instead of all of them like for most IMAX releases.

https://www.slashfilm.com/the-lion-king-imax/
 

Josh Steinberg

Premium
Reviewer
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Jun 10, 2003
Messages
26,250
Real Name
Josh Steinberg
That’s a poorly written article that seems to misunderstand how this works.

All the theaters listed are ones that are laser equipped and can show 1.44:1. What they may mean is that parts of the film open that tall and only those theaters are capable of showing that ratio.

Every single imax release that has had 1.44:1 components in laser and film auditoriums has also opened up to 1.90:1 in digital auditoriums. I suspect that will be the case here.
 

benbess

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Sep 8, 2009
Messages
5,644
Real Name
Ben
Is there an uncanny valley for cgi animals? If so, I think this movie gets close to that sometimes. Still it's an impressive and epic achievement that works fairly well dramatically, and is definitely funny at times. As you folks know, I'm a pushover for most Disney movies, but with that being said I'd say I rate it about a "B". Overall I like the animated version better, and in a few places this one is sometimes a too close remake of the original, which was also sometimes a problem with the Beauty and the Beast remake. If you have A-list, however, I think this is worth seeing even if you're on the fence. Why not imho?
 
Last edited:

Users who are viewing this thread

Latest Articles

Forum statistics

Threads
356,710
Messages
5,121,106
Members
144,146
Latest member
SaladinNagasawa
Recent bookmarks
1
Top