The new Lion King movie opens in July, and it's expected to be one of Disney's most successful reboots. A box office tracking report, via The Hollywood Reporter, states that the film is lining up to make $150 million during its opening weekend in the US and Canada next month.
If The Lion King can reach that box office prediction for its opening weekend, it would become just the fourth of Disney's new live-action reboots to make more than $100 million for its opening weekend. Beauty and the Beast starring Emma Watson is currently the best-performing of the reboots, and it made $174.8 million over its opening weekend in 2017.
Alice in Wonderland made $116 million domestically over its opening weekend, while The Jungle Book made $103.3 million.
1994's The Lion King is one of Disney's most beloved animated movies, so it has a huge amount of nostalgia built in that could help fuel box office performance of the new movie.
Jon Favreau directed the new Lion King, which features the voices of Donald Glover as Simba, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Scar, Beyonce as Nala, and James Earl Jones as Mufasa. The movie boasts eerily-lifelike visuals that were produced by Moving Picture Company, which also did the VFX for The Jungle Book and Detective Pikachu, among a long list of other popular movies.
Disney is calling The Lion King a "live-action" movie because it was apparently made using live-action techniques. As if the Mufasa death scene wasn't already sad enough, the high production values of the new movie are sure to leave audiences in tears in a new way.
The Lion King opens in theatres on July 19. It is directed by Jon Favreau with a script from Jeff Nathanson, who previously wrote the Steven Spielberg movie Catch Me If You Can starring Leonardo DiCaprio.