Film

Disney Just Announced The Cast For The ‘The Lion King’ Remake And It Will Blow Your Mind

Beyoncé is in a Disney movie.

Lion King

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This morning Disney announced the main cast for the Jon Favreau directed remake of The Lion King and holy shit it is magnificent. Are you ready? Are you sitting down? Here we go.

We already knew that everyone’s favourite rapper/singer/actor/writer/director Donald Glover would be playing Simba, John Oliver will play Zazu, and that James Earl Jones would be reprising his role as Mufasa, who he played in the 1994 original. But now Disney has unveiled the rest of the actors in the production including the extraordinary casting of Beyoncé as Nala.

That’s right: Beyoncé is going to be in a freaking Disney movie.

Beyoncé. Playing Nala. In The Lion King.

As tempting as it is to just bask in the glory of this particular announcement it’s definitely worth taking a look at the rest of the cast who are nearly as awesome.

Chiwetel Ejiofor will play Scar, Alfre Woodard (who has been in pretty much everything, but you might recognise her most recently from Luke Cage) will play Sarabi, Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner (!!!) will play Pumbaa and Timon respectively and Keegan-Michael Key is going to be a hyena called Kamari.

It’s all a bit too much, and maybe the first time we’ve felt this excited about a Disney remake.

The film is being helmed by Favreau, who directed the recent remake of The Jungle BookThe Lion King adaptation is being billed as ‘live-action’ but it sounds like it’s actually CGI, unless they’re going to be putting Donald and Bey in cute lion outfits.

It’s set to drop next year and thanks to today’s announcement I think we can officially call it the most hyped film around.