10 Huge Movie Deaths That Totally Fell Flat
4. Mufasa - The Lion King (2019)
Mufasa's (James Earl Jones) death in the original animated version of The Lion King is one of the most devastating and traumatic death scenes in all of cinema, so 2019's "live-action" remake certainly had its work cut out replicating the same level of emotion.
But even with the ever-reliable Jon Favreau at the helm, this CGI iteration of the legendary scene just felt so soulless and lacking.
A big part of the problem is that the ultra-photorealistic renditions of Mufasa, Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and Simba (JD McCrary) rob these characters of the expressiveness they had in the original animation.
By striving so hard to be "realistic," it feels less "real," emotionally speaking.
On top of this, basically everything about the scene is worse this time around - Scar's utterance of "Long live the King!" the swipe which sends Mufasa falling to his death, Mufasa's comical falling scream, and even Simba's terrified "Noooooo!"
Even with the audience's in-built affection for this story, Mufasa's death roused scarcely a fraction of the heartbreak that it did in the 1994 animation, which really surmises the problem with the whole movie - it feels like an obligatory Product rather than a story someone genuinely wanted to tell (again).