Several details surrounding The Lion King 2 were recently confirmed at the Disney Investor Day events, including that the movie will be a prequel and that Moonlight director Barry Jenkins will be at the helm of the live-action remake. Jenkins has now offered a little more insight into the project, praising the script, and asserting his connection to the 1994 animated original.

"Yeah, it's pretty cool. My agents send me a lot of scripts. When this one came, super top secret, I was very skeptical. Like you, I remember when The Lion King came out. I had two nephews, and so I used to watch it with them. Lion King was the "Baby Shark" of my time. I'd seen it literally hundreds of times and I had this connection to it, and yet I was skeptical because, who am I to make a Lion King movie? Not a {Lion King sequel! A Lion King movie."

The idea of making a Lion King movie was too much for Barry Jenkins to comprehend at first, but gradually he came around, thanks in large part to the quality of the script.

"I read the script and about 40 pages in I turned to Lulu [Wang] and I said, "Holy sh*t, this is good." And as I kept reading, I got further away from the side of my brain that said, "Oh, a filmmaker like you doesn't make a film like this," and allowed myself to get to the place where these characters, this story, is amazing. What really pushed me across the line was James, my DP, said, "You know what? There's something really interesting in this mode of filmmaking that we haven't done and that not many people have done." That was when I went back to the powers that be and said, "I would love to do this, but I've got to be able to do what I do. And they said yes!"

While more specific plot details for The Lion King prequel are being kept under wraps, the plot will likely shed some light on Mufasa's past and his relationship with villainous brother Scar. It was previously reported that, rather than being a straight-up prequel, the movie would progress the story of the main characters from the first movie at the same time as exploring Mufasa's origin. This could still be the case and would allow the Disney movie to bring back familiar faces such as Simba and Timon and Pumbaa.

Legendary composer Hans Zimmer will provide the score alongside the multi-talented Pharrell Williams and Moonlight composer Nicholas Britell, with the movie once again utilizing the ground-breaking photo-realistic computer animation that brought the first movie to life. Jeff Nathanson, who wrote 2019's The Lion King, reportedly wrote the script that Jenkins is so excited about. The Lion King 2 has not yet been given a release date or production start date, nor has the cast yet been confirmed, but considering the billion-dollar success of the first The Lion King, the prequel likely a high priority for Disney. This comes to us courtesy of Variety.