The Lion King's Scar & Mufasa Weren't Brothers & Our Whole World Just Shattered

Our entire childhood was made up of watching Disney animated movies over and over again, and none more so than The Lion King.

We had always assumed that Mufasa and Scar were indeed brothers in the movie, because Scar calls Mufasa his brother; and Mufasa says “brother” to Scar too (even though it’s when he’s being killed by him) — so you can count us as one of the many whose childhood director Rob Minkoff and producer Don Hahn just ruined.

In an interview with Hello Giggles, they revealed that the two male lions of the pride weren’t brothers at all.

“[While making the movie] we talked about the fact that it was very likely [Scar and Mufasa] would not have both the same parents,” they revealed. “The way lions operate in the wild…when the male lion gets old, another rogue lion comes and kills the head of the pride. What that does is it causes the female lions to go into heat [to reproduce], and then the new younger lion kills the king and then he kills all the babies. Now he’s the new lion that’s running the pride.”

“There was always this thing about well, how do you have these two [male] lions? Occasionally there are prides that do have two male lions, in an interesting dynamic because they’re not equals [since they don't have the same parents],” Rob and Don continued.

They add, “One lion will always kind of be off in the shadows.” THAT’S SCAR BTW!

“We were trying to use those animal truths to underpin the story so we sort of figured Scar and Mufasa couldn’t really be from the same gene pool. In fact, that’s what [Scar] says. There’s a line, he goes, ‘I’m from the shallow end of the gene pool.’ When he’s talking to Mufasa, when Mufasa gets mad at him for not coming up to the coronation of Simba.”

SEE! Entire childhood ruined in the course of 10 minutes. Completely ruined.

The Lion King‘s Blu-ray and DVD re-release will be out on August 29th.