Director Jon Favreau announced first names of the cast on Twitter
Rapper and actor Donald Glover will play Simba in Disney’s remake of The Lion King. The announcement arrived through the director himself, Jon Favreau, who tweeted also the name of James Earl Jones, who will return to the role of Simba’s father, Mufasa.
Glover is living a “golden moment” for his career: the american star from The Martian and Spiderman: Homecoming is currently filming Star Wars spin-off about the young Han Solo, in which he will play Lando Calrissian.
The Lion King is one of the biggest animated film of all time and grossed over $900 million at the box office. The original 1994 animated film featured Jonathan Taylor Thomas voicing young Simba and Matthew Broderick playing the adult version of the character.
There’s so much debate about how this new version will look like: after some unconfirmed rumors, it’s quite sure it won’t be a live-action film, but it’s also possible it will follow some guidelines used in recent Favreau’s success The Jungle Book.
According to a Disney press release: “The Lion King builds on Disney success of re-imagining its classics for contemporary audience with films like Maleficent, Cinderella and the upcoming Beauty and The Beast.”
Although Favreau is a big fan of virtual reality, we have to wait and see how much he will “re-imagine” The Lion King. Is there a release date? Not at the moment but, following the success of The Jungle Book, the project became a priority for Disney.
