If the original didn't exist this definitely wouldn't be as offensive to me but regardless it's still pretty bad...

Rating: 1/10 (19 July 2019)

I don't know what I even expected. It sucked. It was the exact same movie except everything that was kept concise and streamlined in the original is stretched out to just make everything boring. The best scenes in the film were just shot for shot recreations of scenes from the original. And even some of those were embarrassing and laughable.
Every voice actor except for Billy Eichner was god awful. All of the characters aren't changed for the sake of making them new and different characters. They're all the same characters with less personality and less soul. Scar has no character. He's not cunning or extremely flamboyant, he's just a boring antagonist. Donald Glover was Matthew Broderick as Simba, Seth Rogen was Seth Rogen, Beyonce was a singer trying to act (not unlike any other role she's portrayed in movies), John Oliver was doing Last Week Tonight outtakes, and Eric Andre said Simba looked like a snack and it was super uncomfortable.
No choices that were made improved the original in any way. Were they expecting me to think, "Wow, The Lion King is a great movie about characters that I can personally connect and empathize with, but you know what it really needs? Photorealistic redesigns so I can't connect with them anymore."
This movie also marks the reunion of music's sorely missed collaboration, Hans Zimmer and Pharrell Williams, of Amazing Spider-Man 2 fame. Needless to say they really spam all the classic instrumental pieces, obviously to manipulate people into feeling the same emotions from the original. Every rewrite of the songs by Elton are just worse versions of the original songs, and oh my god when Simba is running back to the pridelands and they forced in that new Beyonce song I wanted to vomit.
One extra star for the visual effects. That's it. Don't watch this movie. Just watch Planet Earth on Netflix or something.