Disney executives originally viewed 'The Lion King' as a secondary, low-risk project while their top animators were assigned to work on the supposedly prestigious 'Pocahontas'.

A closer look

Disney executives originally viewed 'The Lion King' as a secondary, low-risk project while their top animators were assigned to work on the supposedly prestigious 'Pocahontas'. In the early 1990s, the studio leadership was entirely convinced that the historically inaccurate romance about early American colonization was guaranteed to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Meanwhile, the weird movie about singing animals recreating Hamlet in Africa was given to the junior staff to keep them busy. Predictably, the historical prestige piece faded into cultural irrelevance, while the junior project became the highest-grossing hand-drawn animated film in history and birthed a Broadway musical that practically prints its own money!