10 Terrible Movies That Still Smashed The Box Office
2. The Lion King
There is a reason Disney keeps remaking its classics. Shamelessly banking on nostalgia and the popularity of some of the most famous animated films of all time, with a few exceptions, almost guarantees a huge pile of money.
Though Snow White famously bombed, it is an exception against the likes of Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Alice in Wonderland, all of which grossed over $1 billion. However, none of them came even close to the $1.6 billion pulled in by 2019's The Lion King.
Based on the name alone, and off the back of the wild success of Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book three years earlier (one of the only remakes that you could argue was actually worth doing), reimagining The Lion King was always going to earn a huge amount of money. It didn't matter how good or bad it was, but for the record... it was bad.
It wasn't so much a reimagining of the story, as much as telling exactly the same story in a "realistic" aesthetic, which achieved absolutely nothing but robbing the animals of any and all emotion or personality. After the hype of seeing The Lion King once again died down, it's no surprise that Mufasa: The Lion King failed to bring in even half of what its predecessor grossed five years earlier.