The 2019 movie that Elton John couldn’t stand: “A huge disappointment to me”
Elton John has long intertwined himself with movies, finding a direct link between the musical worlds he crafts and something inherently cinematic.
In 1971, he made his first foray into film soundtracks when he and Bernie Taupin composed the score for Lewis Gilbert’s admittedly questionable romance Friends, which sees two teenagers face the realities of adult life when they wind up pregnant. Everyone has to start somewhere, though, and John would continue churning out albums over the coming years, like the Wizard of Oz-inspired Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which would lead him to become one of music’s most popular figures.
It wasn’t a surprise, then, when a few decades later, still at the top of his game as a pop culture icon, he was asked to compose the soundtrack for Disney’s 1994 The Lion King, which would become a sensation, and John’s soundtrack, made in collaboration with Taupin and Hans Zimmer, became a hit too.
With tracks like ‘I Just Can’t Wait to Be King’, ‘The Circle of Life’, and ‘Hakuna Matata’, the soundtrack itself sold enough copies to become the highest-selling for an animated film, while three of the songs were nominated for ‘Best Original Song’ at the Oscars, with ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight’ winning the Academy Award, making it his first of two golden statuettes Elton has won in his career thus far.
John’s contributions to The Lion King still remain some of his most popular and beloved works, and they surely mean a lot to him, too, which is why the 2019 remake of the film left him feeling incredibly let down, because it erased the musical brilliance that’s so present in the original.
Jon Favreau’s photorealistic version had an incredibly large budget of $260million, and while it grossed over $1billion, many critics couldn’t see the point of the film. It was practically the same as the original, just animated differently.
John wasn’t keen on the film’s soundtrack, even though he, along with Zimmer, did return to the project. Many of John’s iconic songs from the original were performed by new actors, like Donald Glover and Beyoncé, with the latter also contributing an original track, ‘Spirit’. Despite the fact that the movie clearly tried to capture the magic of the 1994 score by bringing back many of the same collaborators, John wasn’t convinced that it was a success.
Talking to GQ, the singer revealed his feelings towards the movie, saying, “The new version of The Lion King was a huge disappointment to me, because I believe they messed the music up. Music was so much a part of the original, and the music in the current film didn’t have the same impact”. He even went as far as to add that the “magic and joy were lost”.
The singer continued, “The new soundtrack fell out of the charts so quickly, despite the massive box-office success. I wish I’d been invited to the party more, but the creative vision for the film and its music was different this time around, and I wasn’t really welcomed or treated with the same level of respect. That makes me extremely sad.”
