There's a Lion King remake coming too!

It seems like it's out of the jungle to the Pride Lands for Jon Favreau as the director has just been confirmed to be working on a live action version of The Lion King.

He's just coming off a big hit with The Jungle Book, and obviously has form as a filmmaker of note for the first two Iron Man movies. And Disney is on a real live action push these days, with Cinderella and Jungle Book already out there, Beauty and the Beast on the way and more including Aladdin, Mulan and Dumbo.

Here's the first whisper that dropped about the project.

Disney has since confirmed with a press release that talks about all the dollars which the 1994 original made, right smack in the middle of the companies 90s Renaissance. It has also been said that some songs from the original will be used.

Quite apart from the question of Why(!?) The Lion King is a bit of a strange one for a live action re-telling, primarily because it has no human characters. Almost all of The Jungle Book was CG anyway, so it's a stretch to really consider a film populated by CG animals with CG backgrounds as a regular film.

Still you can be sure it will look particularly gorgeous (as did the original) with even more time to perfect the almost photo-real creatures of The Jungle Book. You can probably expect a few new songs and a bunch of extra action scenes for no particular reason.

There's no word on a release date yet but you can expect a minimum of two years given how much work these kinds of films require.