Disney "Hopes" That 'Mufasa' Is This Year's 'Rogue One,' Not Another 'Marvels'

The new trailer sells Barry Jenkins' 'Lion King' prequel as "the movie we need right now," but quality, not timeliness, might prevent another 'Alice Through the Looking Glass'-level box office crash.

With D23 Brazil in full swing, we just got a final trailer for Mufasa: The Lion King. The preview is what you would expect: setting up the how and why of Mufasa and Scar meeting each other as younger cubs and eventually teaming up to ward off hostile invaders. It looks visually scrumptious, livelier, and more colorful than Jon Favreau’s (technically spectacular) 2019 remake. Disney will attempt to sell the idea, even implicitly with the help of a potentially willing Internet, that the action drama about young Mufasa and young Taka/Scar refusing to “bend to evil” and uniting to “fight together” against an evil conquering despot is “the movie we need right now.” It’s essentially the eighth anniversary of the Rogue One: A Star Wars Story trailer that turned “Rebellions are built on hope” into a kind of online rallying cry just days after the first time Trump defeated a supremely qualified female candidate to become the U.S. President.  

That somewhat worked eight years ago. I don’t think Lucasfilms’ Rogue One: A Star Wars Story would have been *quite* as successful ($532 million domestically and $1.06 billion worldwide) in proverbial peacetime. Quite a few younger folks voted against Kamala Harris and/or for Donald Trump this time around, which complicates such narratives. Younger voters still voted for the Democrats over the Republicans. Yet, the outcome will make it harder to position the somewhat timely/topical Wicked Part One and Gladiator II and (presumably/sight unseen) Moana II and Mufasa: The Lion King as much more than bread and circuses distraction. They, and next year’s batch of franchise tentpoles, might be, at best, assurances to the 49% of us that we aren’t insane. It’s one thing when younger Americans were essentially/arguably sold out by their older brethren in 2016. It’s another when 2024 comparatively shows that G.I. Joe: Retaliation was even more prescient (alongside Observe and Report) than I argued even in early 2021.