Academy Award and Independent Spirit Award-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins forgot the first role of the internet: never read the comments. After posting the Mufasa: The Lion King trailer to social media on Monday, The Moonlight director found himself engaged in a back-and-forth with Twitter users upset that he was working on a franchise movie for Disney. In response to the first of two critics calling Disney “Iger’s soulless machine,” Jenkins responded by defending the artistic merits of The Lion King. It wasn’t long before he had to throw up his hands and call it, though — as does basically every reasonably serious person who finds themselves trapped in a conversation on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
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Q. Anthony Ali, a writers whose work has appeared in MacLean’s and who reportedly used to contribute to the Canadaland podcast, chimed in to claim that “I interviewed you when you premiered Moonlight at TIFF, and that Barry Jenkins wouldn’t have said what you just said.” Jenkins responded by sharing a number of kid-centric projects he had made and posted online around the time he was working on Moonlight.
“There is nothing soulless about The Lion King,” Jenkins told the first critic. “For decades children have sat in theaters all over the world experiencing collective grief for the first time, engaging Shakespeare for the first time, across aisles in myriad languages. A most potent vessel for communal empathy.”
Both that initial critic — someone named Krystian who has “fire David Zaslav” and “Release Coyote vs. Acme” in their bio — and Ali were primarily critical of Jenkins’ decision to work within the Disney system, with Ali arguing that “Disney represents the capture of creative expression by finance-driven corporate interests, and it exists to fence children’s imaginations behind a paywall.”
At a certain point, though, Jenkins wasn’t having any more of the conversation and just told Ali that he was “going back to work.”
Critiques of Disney are nothing new — and of course, neither are critiques of Mufasa in general, since the movie is a prequel to a live-action remake — not exactly the kind of thing that screams originality. Of course, that kind of misses the point, as projects like The LEGO Movie, Barbie, and a sequel to Puss in Boots all seem like terrible ideas on the surface, but those movies were huge hits with critics and audiences because the filmmakers behind them brought something unexpected to the table.
