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20th Aug 2017

Mind = blown: The Lion King director reveals a secret about Scar and Mufasa

The movie is 23-years old.

Gillian Fitzpatrick

It’s the hit movie that is a certainly one of cinema’s all-time classics.

Now, some 23-years after The Lion King was released to critical and audience acclaim, the director and the producer have made a rather startling claim about Scar and Mufasa.

Yes, director Rob Minkoff and producer Don Hahn told Hello Giggles in an interview that the two lions are not brothers because that is not how a pride operates.

“We talked about the fact that it was very likely [Scar and Mufasa] would not have both the same parents,” Mr Hahn revealed.

“The way lions operate in the wild… when the male lion gets old, another rogue lion comes and kills the head of the pride. What that does is it causes the female lions to go into heat, and then the new younger lion kills the king and then he kills all the babies. Now he’s the new lion that’s running the pride.”

He added: “Occasionally there are prides that do have two male lions, in an interesting dynamic because they’re not equals. One lion will always kind of be off in the shadows.

“We were trying to use those animal truths to underpin the story so we sort of figured Scar and Mufasa couldn’t really be from the same gene pool.”

Although they refer to one another as ‘brothers’ during the movie, Scar also does tell Mufasa in the opening segments that he is “from the shallow end of the gene pool”.

A live-action remake of The Lion King is currently in development and will be released in July 2019.