10 Movies That Tried To Exploit Nostalgia (And Won)

5. The Lion King

Though Jon Favreau's "live-action" remake of The Lion King received mixed reviews from critics, its popularity among general audiences absolutely cannot be discounted.

The film received an "A" CinemaScore and grossed an astonishing $1.656 billion, making it by far the most successful of Disney's live-action remakes of its classic animated movies.

The original 1994 animated film is, of course, a near-universally beloved masterpiece of the medium, and the marketing for the remake did a superb job of exploiting our collective nostalgia for it.

One of the film's prominent trailers even focused in on Mufasa (James Earl Jones) telling Simba (Donald Glover), "Remember," as if to subconsciously urge the audience to do the very same.

And while many nevertheless found the film's ultra-realistic VFX ultimately quite offputting, casual audiencess less concerned with the particulars of CGI clearly weren't bothered at all.

As a more-or-less shot-for-shot remake of the original film, it exploited nostalgia with an almost surgical precision, even if for many the end result was simply a mechanical, soulless exercise.