"The thing is, there’s no way to watch the new Lion King and not think of the old one, even if the new one is the only one you’ve seen."

"Every time a clunker dropped, I wondered if there was a version of the movie where it actually worked. It’s weird, and eventually grating, the way John Oliver’s hornbill keeps hopping around as he blurts out one-liners, but maybe it would work better if the bird had arms, or at least cartoonish wings he could move like them?...  I didn’t need to have seen the original to know that the Beyoncé song jammed in over helicopter shots of capering animals and not sung by any of the characters was the one that had been added to the soundtrack so that Bey could get her Oscar nomination, although I turned to the person next to me and asked, 'Is this the new one?' just to make sure.... Without an immensely popular original to guarantee the new movie’s audience, the idea of making a musical about lions that also looks like a National Geographic special would have seemed insane.... You could destroy every print, every Blu-ray, every iTunes download of the original Lion King, and the new one would still feel like a copy."

Writes Sam Adams in "What It’s Like to See the New Lion King When You’ve Never Seen the Old Lion King/Even if you’ve never watched Disney’s animated original, you can tell something’s off" (Slate).

At some point, it's weird enough almost to make me want to see it for the extreme weirdness, and I have seen the original cartoon movie and the Broadway show, and I didn't like either of them. It's not that I expected to like them, by the way. I was accompanying children. I really dislike the idea that the lion is "king" of the jungle and that the other animals (the prey) are in love with the idea and the one animal who's irritated by royal succession is a horrible creep. Bleh! What a terrible idea for an story to inspire children. How about a "Wicked" style remake where we get the story from the point of view of the villain and the villain becomes the hero? No, that won't work, because the original story is too stupid and dull.