In Paris, mid-November, Barry Jenkins is on tour. An important man’s tour, with a vibrant army of publicists and a packed house full of journalists and cinema content creators who came to watch the first forty minutes of the next blockbuster from Disney studios. At 45, the Oscar-winning director and screenwriter of Moonlight (2016), a moving melodrama about adolescence and the entry into adulthood of a young gay boy in the South of the United States, has successfully moved from the margins to the center, from independent cinema to the general public.
With its budget of more than 200 million dollars, his latest film, Mufasa : Le Roi Lion, in theaters on December 18, should mark its consecration. But, thirty years later The Lion King, which chronicled little Simba’s acceptance of his destiny as monarch after the death of his beloved father, and in the wake of the multiple creations derived from the original cartoon (a live-action remake in 2019, two television series, video games, a musical, a musical film by Beyoncé in 2020, etc.), times have changed.
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