Disney Reveals Roaring Success Of ‘Mufasa’

‘Mufasa’ overcome a shaky start to become a roaring success at the box office. © 2024 Disney Enterprises Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Disney Enterprises

Disney has revealed that last year’s live action movie Mufasa: The Lion King cost less to make than expected enabling it to roar off with hundreds of millions of dollars in profits at the box office.

Few movie studios are as innovative as Disney. Its Pirates of the Caribbean series set the standard for theme park adaptations, its Marvel movies essentially invented modern-day super hero films and its live action remakes of classic cartoons created a completely new category. It makes the most of its ingenuity.

One of the most common criticisms of the studio is that it squeezes every cent out of its franchises with sequel after sequel. This packed pipeline means that maintaining its standards is far from child’s play, especially with the live action adaptations of its famous fairytales.

Producing word for word remakes of them risks accusations of laziness while making major changes to the source material can anger fans of the originals. The more movies Disney makes in this line the greater the chance that it will miss the mark. Over the decade prior to the pandemic few of its 14 live action remakes disenchanted fans. Four of them grossed over a billion dollars so it looked like Disney had found a magic formula.

However the pandemic cast a dark spell on its success rate which has worsened in recent years. All three live action remakes released between 2022 and 2023 were savaged by critics with the best-performer being The Little Mermaid but even that only got a score of 67% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

This set the scene for the next in the series being a bust at the box office and it couldn’t have had much bigger boots to fill.

Mufasa, a photorealistic film about talking animals in the African savanna, debuted in December last year. It was a prequel to The Lion King which was Disney’s highest-grossing live action remake with takings of $1.7 billion. In turn that was based on the beloved 1994 animated original which raised the stakes even higher for Mufasa.

The movie focuses on the relationship between the eponymous father of the cub in The Lion King and his brother, Scar, who becomes his arch-enemy. With a critics score of just 56% on Rotten Tomatoes, it didn’t look like the stars had aligned for Mufasa and when it debuted, trade titles rounded on it.

“The big new cat this weekend landed with more of a meh than a roar,” wrote Deadline while Variety added that it was “lacking the bite of Disney’s prior live-action adaptations”.

They justified this on the grounds that the movie only made $87.2 million overseas and a total of $122 million worldwide in its opening weekend which was “far behind pre-release expectations of $130 million overseas and $180 million globally.”

It sounded like there was no chance the movie would have a happy ending at the box office especially as it was beaten in its opening weekend by another children’s film – Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Deadline wrote that this was “shocking indeed given how Disney has dominated the Christmas field in the past with Avatar and Star Wars movies.”

However, the box office for kids’ films tends to be depressed prior to Christmas as families are busy with holiday preparations. It usually surges after that and this is when Mufasa sprung to life. Its takings were higher than Sonic’s on Christmas Day and had the highest haul at the box office in its third and fifth weekends.

Mufasa ended up outgrossing the hasty hedgehog domestically and internationally, which accounted for a massive 64.8% of its takings. It didn’t escape the attention of movie industry guru Valliant Renegade who explained that it is crucial “to look at the domestic vs intl because you occasionally get a film that wildly skews one way or another. Mufasa is a great example.”

Ironically for a movie about a big cat, Mufasa had a helping hand from a Mouse. Disney’s sway in the industry got the movie on a mighty number of screens according to WDWPro, expert pundit for leading movie and theme park portal That Park Place. Mufasa also ran in theaters for three weeks longer than Sonic 3 though this has no bearing on whether it made a profit at the box office. That is a product of two factors – Mufasa’s takings and its costs.

According to Box Office Mojo, the movie ended up grossing $722.6 million but Disney didn’t pocket all of that. The amount that theaters pay to studios is known in the trade as a rental fee and an indication of the typical level comes from film industry consultant Stephen Follows who interviewed 1,235 film professionals in 2014 and concluded that, according to studios, theaters keep 49% of the takings on average.

This research lends weight to a widely-established 50-50 split which would give Disney $361.3 million from Mufasa. Then come the costs.

Without giving a specific source, Deadline and Variety both put the production costs of Mufasa at $200 million but there is no need to speculate about it.

The cost of making movies in the United States is usually a closely-guarded secret as studios combine them in their overall expenses and don’t itemize how much was spent on each one. It’s a different story in the United Kingdom. Studios filming there get a cash reimbursement, in the form of a tax credit, of up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the country provided that it comes to at least 10% of the production’s core costs.

In order to demonstrate this to the authorities, studios set up separate companies to produce each movie they make in the U.K. and they are obliged to file legally-binding financial statements. They show everything from the headcount and salaries to the total costs and the level of reimbursement.

You might well wonder why this matters as Mufasa’s lush backdrops were scanned in on site in Africa and the film doesn’t feature a single human actor as its cast is comprised of digital animals. They are the answer to the question.

Mufasa contained 1,500 shots of fully Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) and they were created by a team of more than 1,700 artists, production crew and technologists at visual effects firm MPC.

They were led by production VFX Supervisor Adam Valdez, a 35 year industry veteran who cut his teeth in 1990 working as an assistant mold maker on Robocop 2. Valdez went on to contribute to some of the most groundbreaking VFX in modern movie history including Jurassic Park where he was involved with the computer systems for the legendary Tippett Studio. He later switched to Weta Digital where he was the animation department head on The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in 2002. Valdez was heavily involved with Disney’s Lion King remake and its other animal-centric live action movie, 2016’s The Jungle Book. He is based in London and the film making team behind Mufasa was split between there, New York and Los Angeles. They had a magic touch.

MPC’s acclaimed Character Lab team created more than 118 animals in meticulous detail for the movie with Mufasa’s body alone covered with nine million hairs. It didn’t come cheap.

As the work done in London came to more than 10% of the movie’s core costs it was enough for Disney to take advantage of the fiscal incentives in the U.K. The studio’s U.K. subsidiary behind the movie is called Trueborn Heir Productions in a nod to a key plot point of the Lion King involving Scar assuming the savannah’s throne after he kills Mufasa and chases off his trueborn heir, Simba.

The latest financial statements for the company show that by January 31 last year its costs had hit $175.9 million (£137.9 million) which was “in line with the production budget.”

This was around 11 months before the movie was released so the total cost could hit the $200 million mark that Deadline and Variety claimed. However, according to MPC, as 2024 arrived, the film was on the homestretch, with shots receiving a full-resolution treatment for 3D cinemas, so the vast majority of the work had already been done.

It is all shown on the financial statements because the terms of the reimbursement state that they have to disclose the movie’s entire costs, not just the money spent in the U.K. Furthermore, studios aren’t allowed to hide costs elsewhere as the terms also state that there can only be one production company for each film.

Reflecting the lack of a physical set and crew, the financial statements show that no staff were employed by the company at any time during the production process.

The reimbursement cast a powerful spell on the picture’s bottom line. It is calculated on up to 80% of core expenditure which means that if the core costs of a movie come to $100 million and it is all spent in the U.K., only $20.4 million will be reimbursed at most as that is 25.5% of $80 million. Accordingly. in order to get back the maximum 25.5% of the money they spend in the U.K., production companies need to ensure that 20% of their core costs are spent outside the country. It appears that Disney exceeded that thanks to the production team in Africa scanning in the backgrounds and the VFX work done in the U.S.

It led to the company receiving a $11.4 million (£9 million) tax credit in the U.K. which only equated to 6.5% of its total costs. It was money well spent by the U.K. government.

The CGI work on Mufasa could have been carried out in a number of countries. It didn’t have to be done in the U.K. so the decision to do it there undoubtedly brought a lot of new money into the country. The spending in the U.K. comes to approximately $45.6 million, which is four times the total tax credit, though this isn’t guaranteed to be precise. If more than 80% of the core costs were incurred in the U.K. then it actually spent more than four times the amount it got back.

What is certain is that the tax credit brought the net spending on the picture down to $164.5 million. Deducting this from Disney’s estimated $361.3 million share of the takings gives a profit of $196.8 million at the box office.

The share of the box office isn’t a studio’s only return from a movie so offsetting it from the costs in the financial statements does not show whether it made a profit or a loss overall. As a Disney spokesperson told me last year, “there will be other income generated by the production (such as DVD/Blu Ray sales, merchandising, etc.). It’s not reflecting a true account of whether the film was overall profitable.”

However, just as the production generates other income, it also incurs other costs, chief of which are the marketing expenses which are not shown in the financial statements of the production companies. Accordingly, if the home entertainment and merchandise sales should be added to the theater takings, the marketing cost should be deducted from them.

Disney doesn’t disclose how much it spends on marketing each picture while the merchandise and streaming sales are tough to attribute to specific productions. A great deal of the former carries the overall Lion King brand, rather than the names of specific movies and streaming viewers don’t pay to watch each one of them because they have monthly subscriptions.

This casts a cloud of uncertainty over the movie’s overall bottom line though the clearest indication could be whether another live action Lion King gets the green light. So far there are only rumors that this could be in the pipeline. In contrast, there is no doubt that Mufasa made a profit at the box office. It was badly needed to compensate for Disney’s next live action remake, Snow White, which bombed at the box office in March with takings of just $205.7 million.

In stark contrast, Snow White was followed in May by the remake of Lilo & Stitch which grossed $1 billion making it the second highest-grossing film of the year so far. The adaptation of fan-favorite Moana is next on the slate for July 2026 and although it seems like a safe bet, the past five years have proven that it is tough to tell which direction this roller coaster ride is heading in.