The chairman of Disney said on Thursday that the company is apologizing to a California elementary school that was asked to pay for a license after it showed “The Lion King” at a fund-raiser organized by students’ parents in 2019.

Robert A. Iger, the chairman, said in a post on Twitter that the company “apologizes to the Emerson Elementary School P.T.A. and I will personally donate to their fund raising initiative.”

The event on Nov. 15 was meant to be a fun night at the movies for students at Emerson Elementary School in Berkeley, Calif., with pizza and a showing of “The Lion King.” Students were encouraged to bring blankets and wear pajamas to the fund-raiser, although no children would be denied entry if they could not afford one of the $15 tickets.

But on Tuesday, Emerson’s parent-teacher association said it had been asked by Movie Licensing USA, a licensing company representing Disney, to pay $250 for a screening license, a request that pitted the school against a corporate behemoth and set up a broader conversation about public school funding. “We recently were fined by Disney for a movie night,” the group said on Facebook, where it also announced a fund-raiser to help pay for it.