Lin-Manuel Miranda is one of musical theater and film’s most prolific artists and he’s about to add the new Lion King movie to his list of hits.
We guarantee you’ve had at least one of the 44-year-old’s songs stuck in your head in the past. From some of Broadway’s most exciting musicals in the last few decades to Disney’s biggest recent hits, Miranda has built quite the legacy.
He first made a name for himself in 2008 when he created the musical In the Heights on Broadway. It won four Tonys, including Best Musical and Best Original Song. Then in 2015, Miranda took Hamilton, his most famous production to date, to Broadway, effectively blowing up his career. By then he had also caught the eye of the Mouse House and had begun working on one of its most beloved films in recent memory.
Which Disney movies feature music by Lin-Manuel Miranda?
Mufasa: The Lion King is only one of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s several collaborations with Disney. The upcoming prequel/sequel to 2019’s The Lion King will include music written by the famed songwriter, who will have big shoes to fill as he follows the footsteps of the likes of Elton John, Hans Zimmer, Pharrell Williams, and Beyoncé.
“We wanted to really find a balance of symbiosis between the music and the film,” director Barry Jenkins told Empire. “Lin really leaned in and tried to find the places that [we] had tried to go deeper into the background of some of these characters.”
Miranda’s work on Mufasa follows his contributions to the new original songs on 2023’s The Little Mermaid, namely “The Scuttlebutt,” “For the First Time,” and “Wild Uncharted Waters,” for which he wrote the lyrics.
Before that, the New York native was in charge of writing the soundtrack for 2021’s Encanto — his first major Disney job since 2016’s Moana. In between the two, Miranda also starred in the Walt Disney film Mary Poppins Returns, released a Hamilton film co-produced by Disney, and contributed to the soundtracks of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
The Disney/Lin-Manuel Miranda catalog continues to grow, with some questionable chapters (we’re looking at you, “The Scuttlebutt”), but mostly extraordinary successes like “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” and “How Far I’ll Go.”
Whether the soundtrack of Mufasa: The Lion King will find company among one category or the other is for the public to decide when the film arrives in theaters Dec. 20, 2024.