Before it was The Lion King, Disney's hit was nearly King of the Kalahari
Disney's 1994 lion story began life as a nature-documentary idea and went through a string of working titles before becoming a musical borrowing from Hamlet. It finished as the year's biggest film, sold over 55 million home video copies, and remains the highest-grossing hand-drawn animated feature ever.
Who thought of it first is disputed. Charlie Fink, then a creative executive at Disney animation, said he pitched something like Bambi in Africa to Jeffrey Katzenberg, Roy E. Disney and Peter Schneider. Another account places the spark on a flight to Europe, with Katzenberg seizing on an African setting and adding coming-of-age themes and death. Katzenberg even described the film as partly about himself.
Treatments piled up. In 1988 author Thomas Disch wrote a nine-page outline called King of the Kalahari. A March 1989 draft by Jenny Tripp introduced the name Simba, with the cub raised by a baboon and a mongoose and fighting a jackal. J. T. Allen's script, finished in January 1990, carried the title The Lion King, and a revision supervised by Ronald Bass was renamed King of the Beasts. Original director George Scribner wanted a documentary feel and left when the studio decided to make a musical with songs by Elton John and Tim Rice.
Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff ended up directing, with a script by Irene Mecchi, Jonathan Roberts and Linda Woolverton. The team travelled to Kenya for research. The story of a prince whose uncle murders his father owes much to Shakespeare, and to the Bible. Voices included Matthew Broderick as adult Simba, Jeremy Irons as Scar, James Earl Jones as Mufasa, and Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella as Timon and Pumbaa.
Opening on June 24, 1994, the film earned an initial $763 million worldwide, second only to Jurassic Park at the time. It kept the animated record until Finding Nemo in 2003, and its first-run total for a traditionally drawn film stood for 31 years until a Demon Slayer film overtook it in 2025. It won two Oscars and a Golden Globe, spawned a stage musical, sequels, television series and a 2019 remake, and entered the National Film Registry in 2016.
Source: The Lion King
