But that doesn't fly, not anymore, because the movie industry has conditioned audiences to think that "reality" and "believability" are the greatest of all creative virtues, and that the live-action blockbuster is the classiest, most respectful way to tell a story. That's why visually daring animated films like "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" only make a fraction of the box office haul of more literal-minded live-action Marvel movies. And it's why almost every spectacle-driven live action (or "live action") blockbuster, from Marvel and DC to the "Star Wars" franchise and the American Godzilla films, and the Transformers, and even Pixar, are obsessed with making sure that countertops and pavement and glass and hair and skin and fur and fire and water look photographically real, and that everything moves believably even you're watching wisecracking toys or combat droids or city-destroying kaiju. To quote a friend, if you follow this creative impulse too slavishly, it's like using a magic wand to make a toaster.

Where you fall on this stuff is anyone's guess, if you care about it at all. You might not, and that's OK. But it should be said that even if you're not obsessed with cinema minutia, this film is still a fascinating aesthetic experiment, less reminiscent of Favreau's previous photorealistic Disney animal picture, "The Jungle Book," than of Gus van Sant's 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," a curiosity that wasn't quite shot-for-shot but got eerily close. Watching this new "Lion King" reminded me of seeing the "Psycho" remake in a theater and hearing people scream their heads off at the film's jump scares, even though they were near-exact reproductions of things Hitchcock had done 28 years earlier, with the same music, but in color instead of black and white, and with different actors.

Who deserves credit for inspiring that powerful emotional reaction in 1998? Alfred Hitchcock, for making "Psycho" in the first place? Or Gus van Sant, for realizing that the master's work was so fully realized that if he copied it as closely as possible, audiences would still scream in the same places 38 years later? If you retain as much of an original work as possible while reimagining it, is it a gesture of respect or timidity? Is the result a thought experiment, or just an easy way ("easy" in terms of imagination, not effort) to make lots of money by creating a slightly different version of a thing people already know they like? Maybe films like the new "Lion King" take the phrase "give the people what they want" absolutely literally, and that's the whole (cynical?) point of their existence. But is slavish fidelity to an old text really what "the people" want? Or is it possible—to paraphrase a different showbiz maxim that's equally true—"the people" don't actually know what they want until someone shows it to them?

