Lin-Manuel Miranda: ‘I have a Pulitzer and a MacArthur Genius Grant. I’m already something no one else is’

It’s hard to overstate what a cultural phenomenon The Lion King soundtrack was in 1994. Of the five songs written by Elton John and lyricist Tim Rice, three were nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars (with ballad “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” triumphing over the epic “Circle of Life” and the exuberant “Hakuna Matata”). Two were nominated for Song of the Year at the Grammys. The soundtrack album was the biggest-selling record of the year in the US, holding off competition from the likes of Nirvana, Green Day and TLC. The songs form the basis of the highest-grossing musical in the history of Broadway. Thirty years on they remain embedded in our collective consciousness, so Lin-Manuel Miranda could be forgiven for feeling wary about being called on to provide the tunes for follow-up Mufasa: The Lion King. “Well, when you list it like that, it’s terrifying!” he says, a sly grin breaking through his black goatee. “I didn’t think about any of those stats!”

Miranda, of course, knows a thing or two about creating cultural phenomenons himself. The 44-year-old New Yorker made his Broadway debut in 2008 with his Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights. A few years later came Hamilton, the hip-hop-inspired historical musical about one of the founding fathers of the US that became a bona fide pop culture juggernaut. It’s been a fixture on Broadway since it debuted in 2015, and in London’s West End since 2017.

Given his track record, Miranda didn’t feel the need to seek counsel from his predecessors John or Rice. “I’ve spoken to them about other stuff. This hasn’t come up,” he demurs. “He’s been very busy,” he adds of Elton. “He’s got Devil Wears Prada and Tammy Faye.” The former, a musical based on the 2006 fashion comedy, began its run in the West End in October. The latter, about the life of evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, opened on Broadway in November, although it has since announced its closure. “We’ve almost switched,” says Miranda. “He’s like the Broadway baby right now and I’m writing this movie music.”

Growing up in Manhattan in a middle-class Puerto Rican family, Miranda had his sights on the bright lights of Broadway from an early age. He started writing In the Heights while attending Wesleyan University, setting the story in the Washington Heights neighbourhood where he still lives with his wife Vanessa Nadal, whom he’s known since high school. They have two sons, 10 and six, with the eldest named after Sebastian the crab from The Little Mermaid. Clearly, Miranda’s love of Disney runs deep. Today, we’re sitting in the shade at San Diego Safari Park, with giraffe, rhino and Somali wild ass grazing on an ersatz savannah behind us. In a separate enclosure nearby, an impressively maned African lion named Bo lazes in the sunshine. The location has been chosen by Disney for its long association with The Lion King franchise: legend has it that animators visited the park ahead of the 1994 original for inspiration and promptly added Timon to the script as comic relief after falling in love with the meerkats.

That first Lion King marked a turning point both for Disney and for animated film. While it was mostly hand-drawn by animators in the traditional Disney style, it was also the studio’s first production to incorporate CGI technology to flesh out crowd scenes, most famously in the dramatic wildebeest stampede sequence. The film was an unprecedented box office success, banking $978m to become the highest-grossing 2D animated film of all time, but it also marked a changing of the guard. The following year saw the arrival of Toy Story, from Disney subsidiary Pixar, the first entirely computer-animated feature film.

These days, Disney is all-in on computer-generated graphics. Despite the fondness much of its audience still has for traditional animation, the studio hasn’t released a 2D film since 2011’s Winnie the Pooh. Yet even as Disney’s aesthetic has changed, The Lion King has remained the jewel in its crown. When Jon Favreau remade the film in 2019 with photorealistic CGI it divided critics but audiences flocked to see it. It made a staggering $1.6bn at the box office, becoming the highest-grossing animated film in history until that record was broken earlier this year by Pixar’s Inside Out 2.

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Mufasa, then, has a tough act to follow. The new film, which acts as both a prequel and a sequel to Favreau’s 2019 version, needs to prove there’s an appetite for photorealistic animation that goes beyond remakes of Disney’s already beloved classics. Whether Barry Jenkins, swapping his film camera for computer-generated landscapes and virtual-reality goggles, has risen to the challenge depends on who you ask. The Times gave the film five stars, calling it a “dazzling prequel with superb songs”, but The Independent’s critic was less impressed, handing out just two stars and calling it a “catastrophic waste” of the Oscar-winning Moonlight director’s talents. For me, Jenkins succeeded in bringing genuine emotional depth to what could otherwise have been a superfluous origin story for the regal Mufasa and his treacherous adoptive brother Scar.

Miranda says it was the chance to collaborate with Jenkins, along with the original film’s musical legacy, that convinced him to make Mufasa his next project. “I felt like I would learn a lot working with Barry,” he says. “But I also felt, given Beyoncé’s incredible [remake-inspired] album [The Gift] that she released in 2019, that The Lion King is almost its own musical genre. It’s rooted in African rhythm and harmonies, but I felt like there was a lot of space to play and break new ground.”

New ground, but also an opportunity for a return to Disney standards. As the composer of Encanto’s chart-topping “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” points out, modern Disney heroines don’t tend to sing love ballads. “It’s almost an endangered species at this point,” says Miranda. “But I grew up in the era of the romantic Disney ballad, ‘Kiss the Girl’, ‘A Whole New World’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight’… pretty much every Tarzan song! Phil Collins didn’t have to go that hard but he did, for us!”

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He was determined to write a ballad for the young Mufasa (voiced and sung by Aaron Pierre) and his love interest Sarabi (Tiffany Boone). “When I read the script and Sarabi says: ‘Tell me it’s you. I know it’s you.’ I was like: ‘That’s the song, thank you very much!’ I knew we were off to the races, and it was a joy to write.”

Elsewhere, his score includes a fleeting nod to the first act of Phantom of the Opera, and also a proper Disney villain anthem, for Mads Mikkelsen’s white lion antagonist Kiros –?which came after Miranda read online that he’s too earnest a songwriter to write anything memorable for a baddie. “I fully went Michael Jordan when I read that,” he jokes, referencing a meme from basketball doc The Last Dance. “‘And I took that personally…’ So that song was not originally in the script, but I was like: ‘Barry, put me in coach, let me do it.’”

Mufasa arrives at a critical time in Disney’s history. Last year, as its expensively acquired golden goose Marvel continued to misfire, the studio was soundly beaten at the global box office by Universal off the back of both Oppenheimer and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. This year, Disney is back on top. Ahead of the release of Mufasa, it already has three of the four highest-grossing films of the year: Inside Out 2, Marvel offshoot Deadpool & Wolverine and Moana 2. The success of the latter has been a major victory for CEO Bob Iger, who made the decision to rework a planned Disney+ series into a theatrical release. In doing so he proved Disney still capable of doing what it did best in its renaissance years: crafting animated musicals that pack out cinemas.

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The huge audiences turning out for Moana 2 can at least in part be attributed to Miranda’s work on the original 2016 film. His infectious soundtrack produced the Oscar-nominated earworm “How Far I’ll Go” and helped Moana become the most-watched streaming film of the past five years, viewed on Disney+ for more than a billion hours. Miranda’s absence from the sequel has been much commented on by critics, but he says he had “lots of meetings” to offer advice to incoming songwriters Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, who took over when the sequel was still being planned as a Disney+ series. In the meantime he released Warriors, a concept album based on the 1979 action film The Warriors. The songs are substantially edgier than his Disney music, as the story follows a street gang battling their way through New York boroughs given voice by rap icons such as Nas (Queens), Busta Rhymes (Brooklyn) and RZA and Ghostface Killah (Staten Island). There will be many who hope Miranda might yet adapt it as his next stage musical.

But before that, there’s the reception of Mufasa to contend with. Disney is well aware there is no such thing as a safe bet when it comes to a $200m blockbuster, even with Miranda’s soundtrack, a critically revered director and a much-loved character at the heart of the story. It can, however, usually count on Miranda’s songs to bring it an awards season stamp of legitimacy. He’s previously earned Academy Award nominations for both Moana’s “How Far I’ll Go” and “Dos Oruguitas” from Encanto. With two Emmys, five Grammys and three Tonys already to his name, the prize-laden composer is only an Oscar short of EGOT status. Still, Miranda insists he’s not troubled by any perceived gap on his mantelpiece. “I reject the notion I’m in this race,” he smiles, his hands forming a gracious shrug. “I have a Pulitzer and a MacArthur Genius Grant. I am already something no one else is!”

‘Mufasa: The Lion King’ is in cinemas in the UK and US from 20 December