There are so many Disney projects in the works from such a wide variety of creators that occasionally you forget which are real and which of them you dreamed up after taking too much cough medicine. At the top of that list is Oscar-winner Moonlight director Barry Jenkins helming a sequel to Jon Favreau's "live-action" The Lion King. For the record, Jenkins has more than earned the decision to do any dang project he wants and get handsomely paid for it in the process, but you're also a liar if you say you predicted a trip to Pride Rock would be the follow-up to If Beale Street Could Talk.

During a recent chat with The Rider filmmaker Chloe Zao for Variety, Jenkins revealed he was also surprised at the idea of a Barry Jenkins Lion King movie. "Lion King was the Baby Shark of my time," he said. "I’d seen it literally hundreds of times and I had this connection to it, and yet I was skeptical because, who am I to make a Lion King movie? Not a Lion King sequel! A Lion King movie.”

However, Jenkins was finally convinced to take on the film thanks to a powerful trio of factors: Jeff Nathanson's script, a conversation with his go-to cinematographer James Laxton, and the fact that Zhao herself is currently making a Marvel movie.

“I read the script and about 40 pages in, I turned to Lulu [Wang] and I said, ‘Holy shit, this is good.’ And as I kept reading, I got further away from the side of my brain that said, ‘Oh, a filmmaker like you doesn’t make a film like this,’ and allowed myself to get to the place where these characters, this story, is amazing. What really pushed me across the line was James [Laxton], my DP, said, ‘You know what? There’s something really interesting in this mode of filmmaking that we haven’t done and that not many people have done.’ That was when I went back to the powers that be and said, ‘I would love to do this, but I’ve got to be able to do what I do.’ And they said yes!…And knowing that Chloe Zhao had gone from one of the most beautiful films of the century with The Rider to making a Marvel movie, I was like, ‘Oh, shit. If she can do it, I can do it.’”

"If it's good enough for Barry Jenkins and Lulu Wang, it's good enough for me" is a life mantra that hasn't steered me wrong yet, so I'm a few notches more excited for this thing than I was an hour ago. For more on Jenkins' Lion King—which will reportedly follow two timelines à la The Godfather Part 2—here is everyting we know so far.