With four songs from the original, Jon Favreau’s Lion King remake is guaranteed to have a great soundtrack. But that’s not enough for perfectionists like Elton John and Beyoncé, who are reportedly working on an original song to close out the 2019 film.

Jon Favreau’s live-action/CGI reboot of The Lion King continues to accrue a big-name Hollywood cast, with The Wrap reporting today that Chiwetel Ejiofor is in talks to voice the evil Scar. If talks go forward, he’d be filling the shoes of Jeremy Irons, who played the role with velvety menace in the 1994 original.

The man who once described himself as looking like a “near-sighted parrot who works in a bank” has just landed a plume role in Jon Favreau’s live-action Lion King movie. According to The Hollywood Reporter, John Oliver has joined the voice cast of the remake as Zazu, the red-billed hornbill whose notable achievements…

Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner might be Disney’s next farting, Hakuna Matata-quoting warthog and meerkat team, with reports coming today that the two comic actors are in talks to play Pumbaa and Timon in Jon Favreau’s upcoming Lion King remake. The Wrap quotes anonymous sources who say the two are in “final…

It’s easy to forget just how thoroughly Disney has monopolized the blockbuster movie industry, but that fact becomes very clear when the studio decides to announce release dates for multiple huge movies all at once. This comes via Variety, which reports that Disney has just announced the premiere dates for Star Wars:…

Expressing his interest in all the single lions (yes, all the single lions), Jon Favreau has his sights set on another big-name performer for his upcoming live-action Lion King movie. Variety reports that Favreau—who recently announced that Donald Glover would star as the voice of Simba in the planned remake, with …

Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…

Sticking to his usual M.O. for big movie announcements, Jon Favreau appears to have just told Twitter that he’s casting Donald Glover as Simba in his live-action remake of The Lion King. Disney has yet to confirm the information, but Favreau tweeted this out earlier this afternoon:

Walt Disney has been the gold standard in animation for the last 80 years or so, the yardstick by which all other cartoons are judged. It was the studio’s Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs that made feature-length animated movies viable back in 1937, and Disney has released over 50 more full-length animated features…

Grand, unified artistic theories don’t get much grander and unified than Dan Harmon’s storytelling process. As detailed in an article on Wired some five years ago, Harmon boiled down Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of the hero’s journey into a simple circle. And once he grasped this storytelling principle he couldn’t stop…

Jon Favreau’s live-action The Jungle Book movie for Disney not only beat the Warner Bros.’ version to the screen, its $966M worldwide box-office take sent the rival project scampering off to 2018 for a release date. The MCU player has already been tapped to helm a sequel. With Favreau so firmly planted himself among…

For a time in the 1960s and 1970s, certain low-budget filmmakers briefly abandoned the horror and softcore porn genres to make extremely cheap kids’ films like The Magic Land Of Mother Goose and The Wonderful Land Of Oz. Why? Because an economic opportunity had presented itself. Theaters were running special kids-only…

In his relentless quest to bring viewers the worst and weirdest that video games have to offer, reviewer Jon Jafari has devoted the latest episode of his popular JonTron webseries to some bootleg games based on classic Walt Disney films. These games, principally from China, are as shameless and baffling as they are…

Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…

The warm weather months have officially arrived, the perfect time for possibly the sunniest and most upbeat song ever written, Smash Mouth’s immortal 1999 hit, “All Star.” But even spring and summer can have their gray, overcast days. Is there an appropriate “All Star” for those occasions, too? Thanks to DJ Cummerbund…

Over the course of nearly 80 years, many notable tunesmiths have contributed songs to Walt Disney animated films, including the Sherman Brothers (The Jungle Book), Alan Menken and Howard Ashman (The Little Mermaid), and Elton John and Tim Rice (The Lion King). That adds up to hours upon hours of original music, and …

Pitchfork reports that M.I.A. has released two new songs, “MIA OLA” and “Foreign Friend,” both written about immigration. The always-relevant issue has been a recent preoccupation for the musician: Her most recent single, “Borders,” addresses the same subject. “Borders” is slated to appear on her forthcoming album, …

Dire Straits’ 1985 Top 10 hit “Walk Of Life” was notorious in the U.S. for its video, for doubling as a pro sports highlight and bloopers reel and for an über-cheesy and über-’80s keyboard line. The song’s dramatic, extended intro especially piqued the interest of one Peter Salomone, however, who developed a…