Jon Favreau's First Documentary 'Lion' Tracks a Real Cub's Fight to Become King
Jon Favreau, the director behind Disney's 2019 The Lion King, has made his first documentary. National Geographic's Lion, a four-part series premiering 19 August, follows a lion cub named Kio through loss, exile and fierce rivals as he fights to survive and take over a pride.
The series was filmed in Kenya's Maasai Mara and is the first natural history production to document a lion's complete journey from cub to king, according to Variety. Favreau executive produced the project alongside Mike Gunton, the BBC Studios Natural History Unit executive producer who first pitched the idea in 2022. Gunton proposed "supersizing" his Dynasties series — a BBC wildlife show following individual animal families — into a multipart documentary focused on a single species.
The two had worked together before, on the first season of Prehistoric Planet, a CGI natural-history series about the last days of the dinosaurs. That collaboration gave Gunton an opening. He already knew that Favreau had used Dynasties as a reference for how lions move and behave while making The Lion King, Gunton told Variety.
The production spent four years in the field. The crew logged nearly 1,400 filming days across 52 shoots — the most time ever spent in the field exclusively following a single pride. Cinematographers Simon Blakeney and Sophie Darlington and Kenyan filmmaker Faith Musembi were part of the team.
Finding the right main character meant meticulous groundwork. The crew initially followed two prides in the Maasai Mara, drawing up family trees and logging identification details down to individual whisker spots for each lion. Eventually they could identify up to 50 lions from different prides by name and family relationships.
The stakes of choosing a cub were high. Gunton noted that 50% of lion cubs do not make it to adulthood, meaning the series could have followed a subject that did not survive. Nature also made the shoot unpredictable. Favreau said the crew could not follow Kio through parts of the rainy season when the Maasai Mara plains became impassable, and Kio and his brothers were sometimes hardly seen for weeks.
One rule defined the production. The team decided not to do any digital augmentation, not to paint things out, and not to manipulate the footage. What the cameras captured is what viewers will see.
The creative team brings familiar names to the project. Hans Zimmer, who scored Favreau's The Lion King, composed the music for Lion. O.J. Lynch provides narration. The series will be available on National Geographic and Disney+, per National Geographic's UK page.
For Favreau, the project closes a circle. The man who built a photorealistic lion on a soundstage spent four years watching a real one grow up — and chose not to touch a frame of it.
