How much Beyoncé is in ‘The Lion King’?
To hear Beyoncé speak is such a rare occurrence that any new instance of it, no matter how fleeting, feels special, like catching a glimpse of a shooting star. So naturally, her involvement with Disney’s remake of “The Lion King” — she voices the adult Nala and created a companion album featuring new music inspired by the movie — has dominated the film’s promotional tour, complete with a meeting between Queen Bey and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, at the British premiere. But how much (nonsinging) Queen Bey should audiences expect to hear in this reenvisioning of Pride Rock? Only a bit.
Though the new film is 30 minutes longer than its predecessor (118minutes in 2019vs. 88minutes in 1994) and features additional scenes for the adult Nala, Beyoncé’s screen time is fairly comparable to Moira Kelly’s in the original.
At a screening of the remake, a reporter tallied 35lines spoken by her character — interpreting a “line” as being any dialogue a character speaks before another character follows up, whether it’s one word or multiple sentences. Some of those lines are simply the exclamation “Simba!” There were 46lines for Kelly, several of which also were “Simba!” Beyoncé’s musical contributions to the remake vastly outweigh that of Kelly, who did not sing in the original. (Singer-songwriter Sally Dworsky performed Nala’s part in the first “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”) Besides her duet with Donald Glover (who plays the adult Simba), Beyoncé gets an additional musical moment: her own “Gonna Fly Now” sequence in the form of the chorus of the new song “Spirit,” which plays over Simba’s triumphant gallop across the desert. Both songs feature Beyoncé’s signature riffing. For some, the ratio of promotion to actual screen time may disappoint. But hey, it’s still Beyoncé, playing a Lion queen to her most zealous of worshippers.