God help us, this Mufasa trailer is actually pretty good

Disney rolled out a lot of trailers and other footage last night during its big D23 Entertainment Showcase, and they mostly fell into two categories: Stuff that was an expansion of things we’d mostly seen before (including expanded trailers for Moana 2 and Agatha All Along), or teases for far-off stuff that the company wasn’t willing to share with the wider internet. (Looking at you, Daredevil: Born Again.) A lot of that former stuff was neat, sure, but didn’t exactly get our hearts racing. So imagine our surprise when we finally checked out the trailer for Barry Jenkins’ “live-action” Lion King prequel, Mufasa, and found ourselves thinking, “Hey, this is actually kind of good.”

Sure, we get to off a bad start, with some gratuitous Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner. But then we get to the actual narrative of Jenkins’ movie, which turns out to be a bit of a Moses story: A young Mufasa is found and rescued by the cub who will one day be called Scar (literally pulling him out of a river), despite his pride’s hatred of outsiders. The two grow up as loving brothers (becoming voiced by Aaron Pierre and Kelvin Harrison Jr. in the process) before going on a quest together to find Mufasa’s birth home. After that, well… We don’t know. (An evil lion, who you know is evil because he’s voiced by Mads Mikkelsen, appears to figure prominently.)

Maybe it’s simply that, unlike every single other Disney remake that has rolled off of the assembly line over the last decade, there’s some narrative tension created here by the fact that we don’t already know the story. God bless whoever edited the trailer, too, for defying all current industry conventions and not including the point where Mufasa and Scar turn on each other in the actual trailer, leaving one tiny ounce of mystery surrounding the actual story, and making us ask ourselves, genuinely, “What happens next?” (Meanwhile, the fact that the CGI, while still not jaw-dropping, still looks less cruddy than it did in Jon Favreau’s 2019 Lion King, helps considerably.)

Mufasa is currently aiming at a December 20, 2024 release.