Mufasa: The Lion King Delayed to Christmas 2024

Disney has delayed Mufasa: The Lion King, the upcoming prequel to The Lion King. The movie, previously scheduled for release on July 5, will now be Disney’s Christmas 2024 release instead. It’s the latest in a series of release-date moves from the studio following the end of the SAG-AFTRA strike, which will put actors back to work but which also now provides the producers with a rough timetable for when things go back to normal. The movie is a rarity, in that it’s a follow-up to one of Disney’s live-action remakes of their animated classics.

Mufasa: The Lion King will be directed by Moonlight‘s Barry Jenkins, from a script from Jeff Nathanson. Krypton star Aaron Pierre will voice Mufasa in the new movie, with Kelvin Harrison Jr. voicing Scar, who will presumably be the film’s villain once again. Not much is known about the film, other than that it is an origin story for Simba’s father. James Earl Jones elected not to return for the film.

“I grew up with this characters, they mean so much to me,” Jenkins explained in an interview last year. “I think the work that Jeff Nathanson, the writer, did and going back into really helping children and anyone who ever loved this property understand what it takes. Kings aren’t just born, they aren’t just made. They have to become who they are through a series of events that a lot of people can relate to. So, in that standpoint, it fits very well with everything else I’ve done. So I feel no pressure, I just want to do a good job.”

“My agents send me a lot of scripts. When this one came, super top secret, I was very skeptical,” Jenkins told Chloe Zhao during a filmed interview in 2020. “I read the script and about 40 pages in I turned to Lulu [Wang] and I said, ‘Holy s**t, this is good.’ And as I kept reading, I got further away from the side of my brain that said, ‘Oh, a filmmaker like you doesn’t make a film like this,’ and allowed myself to get to the place where these characters, this story, is amazing. What really pushed me across the line was James, my DP, said, ‘You know what? There’s something really interesting in this mode of filmmaking that we haven’t done and that not many people have done.’ That was when I went back to the powers that be and said, ‘I would love to do this, but I’ve got to be able to do what I do.’”

Last year, Disney revealed a teaser that was only shown at the D23 Expo, which showed Mufasa as a cub. The story appeared to be narrated by Timon and Pumbaa.