Disney follows a formula, supersizes ‘The Lion King’

Disney has found yet another lucrative way to breathe box office life into its classic animated titles: large-format cinema.

Last holiday season, Disney debuted a special edition of its 1991 “Beauty and the Beast” -- the only animated film to be nominated for a best picture Oscar -- at Imax theaters internationally, complete with a new animated sequence and digital enhancement. The large-format version took in more than $25 million during its four-month run.

On Christmas Day, Disney unveils its large-format edition of “The Lion King.” The 1994 release is the most successful animated film, grossing $771 million worldwide. And like “Beauty and the Beast,” “Lion King” was transformed into a long-running, Tony Award-winning musical.

“Lion King” director Rob Minkoff says the Imax version of the film “is the best presentation of the movie I’ve ever seen. What’s great about turning an animated movie into Imax format is that the digital record of the shots still exist. So when you are printing on the large-format frame, you actually don’t lose any quality, as you would do in a live-action movie.” Because Minkoff was busy working on “Stuart Little 2,” he wasn’t available to help supervise the reformatting of “Lion King,” though he worked on other aspects of the project. But he had no complaints when he saw the finished product.

“The best thing was actually to get back in and do the remix of the sound,” he said. “In the Imax format, the theaters have a different sound system, so the balance had to be changed for everything. Hearing it in that format is just unbelievable. Things like the wildebeest stampede are pretty breathtaking.”