Trivia

James Earl Jones, who played Mufasa from 1994 to 2019, passed away at 93 on September 9, 2024. This film is dedicated to his memory. He was actually asked to return to play Mufasa, but he declined due to retiring from acting in 2022. However, before he died, Jones gave Disney permission to replicate his voice using AI, in addition to using archival audio, with iconic characters Darth Vader and Mufasa in mind. While Mufasa: The Lion King (2024) did not use AI, they did use a brief bit of archival sound towards the beginning of the film.

Mads Mikkelsen is also the voice for Kiros in the Danish version. His older brother Lars Mikkelsen is the voice for Scar in the Danish version of The Lion King from 2019.

Each lion in the film featured over 30,000,000 hairs to achieve the realistic look of fur. Just Mufasa's mane on its own was made up of 16,995,454 hair curves. The lion has 600,000 hairs on his ears, 6.2 million hairs on his legs, and 9 million hairs covering the middle portion of his body. Simulating realistic lion manes for the assembled lions required 40,000-80,000 dynamic curves per character, with custom presets for different weather and physical conditions. Long shots took up to a week per iteration, with final fur caches exceeding 800 GB.

Braelyn Rankins (Young Mufasa) first acted as Simba at age 7 in his elementary school play, two years before he started working as a professional actor.

During "I Always Wanted a Brother", Mufasa looks up into the starry night while remembering his mother. If viewed closely, the eyes of a lion are visible in the sky, showing that a Great King of the Past is watching Mufasa.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: the movies songwriter appears as a member of the Congress of Baboons who votes to exile Rafiki.