"Mufasa" Director Reacts To 'Sell Out' Claims

02/05/2024 02:24

Filmmaker Barry Jenkins struck it big when “Moonlight” won Best Picture at the Oscars. His follow-up efforts like “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “The Underground Railroad” series scored great acclaim as well.

Then he was hired to direct “Mufasa: The Lion King,” the upcoming prequel to the 2019 live-action adaptation of the iconic 1994 animated feature. It’s a hiring that obviously got various people scratching their heads in confusion.

Why would he take such a gig? Granted he has spoken about being a fan of the 1994 film quite a bit, but the 2019 film wasn’t critically well-received and he seems like someone more inclined to do his own works.

After the first trailer released last week, Jenkins came under fire from Film Twitter for working on such a project, one telling he’s too talented to be working for “Iger’s soulless machine”. Another calling him a shill.

Jenkins isn’t taking the criticism lying down, he responded back on X saying:

“There is nothing soulless about 'The Lion King’. 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.”

The comments follow on from a recent Empire interview in which he responded to concern his creativity will disappear in the world of film franchises:

“When you step into a world that already exists, it can be easy to assume that freedom is denied. I think, instead, you have to just work to create freedom, and I think that was what this process was. A friend once said to me, ‘You’ve done the thing you set out to do when, 10 years on, you could put the film up on the wall and point to it and go, ‘There, that's where I am.'”

Will that creativity be smothered? We’ll find out when “Mufasa: The Lion King” premieres in cinemas December 20th.

The post “Mufasa” Director Reacts To ‘Sell Out’ Claims appeared first on Dark Horizons.