Word: lions
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RIDING THE LION KING...
WHAT WONDERFUL NEWS TO HEAR THAT songwriter Elton John will follow the success of The Lion King [Pop Music, March 13] by writing music for a new version of Aida. Maybe now we'll see updates of Carmen, Don Giovanni and Lohengrin, or even new rap versions of Hamlet and King Lear! John E. Brow Chicago Richard Corliss's frank portrayal of John's bad times' being eclipsed by his new, improved, better times was, I hope, the start of the media's casting a more respectful eye toward this funny, brave, phenomenal performer. Leslie Ludwig Cheshire, Connecticut
McAnuff has called How to Succeed a "scathing attack on everything." But as satires go, this one is an amiable, toothless lion (although a lion with quite a roar: the music is occasionally amplified to the point of muddle and distortion). The truth is, we are not far from P.G. Wodehouse country--especially those American fairy tales of his where the hero can hardly take a tumble without landing in a pot of gold, and the distance separating the egghead from the bonehead is minimal. Equipped with a book of maxims, or a new cravat, the Wodehouse hero--like Finch...
...want to control your creative product, you have to also control all its downstream commerce--as Disney does, building The Lion King into a $300 million North American box-office hit, then topping that with $450 million in only two weeks of Lion King video sales. And the hit album and toys and theme-park tie-ins. S, K and G don't have their own theme park in mind just now (for which Disney and Universal must be grateful), but they have big entrepreneurial eyes, and peripheral vision for all those ancillary markets...
...year ago, acting on that wisdom, Katzenberg was getting ready to release The Lion King, and even then, before the $315 million rolled in (not to mention the record $450 million in home-video sales it has racked up in the past two weeks), it didn't look like a high-stakes gamble; Disney animation has been a sure thing ever since Beauty and the Beast. At the same time, Spielberg was preparing to send forth The Flintstones (domestic gross: $135 million), and that was a pretty sure thing too. Lesser men than he had observed that the boomer market...