[quote="Elton John"]I think its a bit odd that no other site has picked up this rumor.[/quote]
Agreed, especially since this leaked back in March. I'm not taking it for a fact; that said, the only real reason I'm not dismissing it offhand -- or at least the main reason, anyway -- is because this site has leaked other Disney things (mostly formally unannounced aspects of MCU projects) that have turned out to be true, and its less declarative nature about the potential change gives it a slightly greater air of legitimacy to me. In my opinion, articles that sound really sure of themselves tend to be the more obviously fake ones, but here they pointed out that the final decision hadn't been made at that point and stressed that it was just an option Disney was considering that may very well not come to fruition.
While we're on Scar -- and a supporting reason for my thinking the redesign consideration might be legit -- I found a different article that speculated on the potential implications of the character being played by Chiwetel Ejiofor:
https://www.obsev.com/entertainment/chi ... -evil.html What they're basically saying is that Ejiofor has played a number of villainous roles onscreen, but most of them aren't cackling madmen even when they could be; rather, his antagonists tend to be on the more soft-spoken cerebral side, usually with some measure of a tragic or sympathetic backstory that motivates their misdeeds. The article posits that if Favreau and Disney made a deliberate choice to cast Ejiofor as Scar, then it might be indication that they'll make him less of a force-of-nature type of evil, "suggest[ing] that
The Lion King (2019) might be a little more nuanced and morally complicated than the one-note Divine Right story of
The Lion King (1994)."
This potential re-characterization of Scar lines up with the fact that "Be Prepared" doesn't seem to be one of the songs they'll be bringing back as a proper musical number, and I think that his potential redesign as a white lion might also play into this characterization. Perhaps he has a bit of an ego complex, seeing himself as divine due to his coloration (a nod to the fact that real white lions are seen as sacred in some traditional South African cultures) and his denial of the throne only exacerbates his jealousy towards Mufasa and Simba. I don't know, I'm just hypothesizing.