8 Movie Remakes That Pissed Off The Original Creators

5. The Lion King

The Lion King Simba
Disney

Disney's other mega-successful 2019 remake, The Lion King was also criticised by the people who worked on the original. In this case though, it wasn't just one guy on Twitter: it was an entire group of artists speaking to The Huffington Post.

The outlet contacted 13 people who contributed to the original film, and the majority of comments they received took a negative stance against the remake.

David Stephan - who worked on the animated version's Circle of Life scene - made his dislike of the remake clear, saying that “If you polled the crew of the original Lion King, most of them would say, ‘Why? Did you really have to do that?’ It kind of hurts.”

Stephan also criticised the performances in the remake, labelling them "wooden", while also lambasting the decision to depict the animals in such a realistic way.

Elsewhere, three anonymous animators said that they weren't even planning to watch the remake, while another admitted that there was a lot of "resentment" against The Lion King (and other live-action remakes) from the people who worked on the original.

Considering that they didn't get any compensation... you can't really blame them.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!