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Film Theory: Why Scar is the RIGHTFUL King! (Disney Lion King)

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MatPat says the Pride Lands got the coronation backward, and actual lion biology backs him up.

Disney’s photorealistic remake of The Lion King hit theaters in July 2019, and it sent MatPat and The Film Theorists digging into something the animated original never bothered to check: how real African lion prides actually pick their leaders. The resulting video, “Film Theory: Why Scar is the RIGHTFUL King! (Disney Lion King),” throws out Hamlet-style morality and applies actual zoology to Mufasa, Simba, and Scar’s power struggle. What it finds flips the movie’s entire moral framing on its head.

• Real lion coalitions frequently share pride leadership between dominant males rather than following strict hereditary succession, undercutting the film’s assumption that the throne simply passes father-to-son.
• Scar’s darker mane is framed by the video as a real biological signal of higher testosterone, better nutrition, and greater physical vitality — traits that make a male lion more attractive to a pride’s lionesses than a lighter-maned rival like Mufasa.
• Pride takeovers in the wild routinely involve violent competition and infanticide when a new male seizes control, meaning Scar’s coup lines up with natural lion behavior rather than standing out as an aberration.

The Coalition Problem With Pride Rock

The video’s opening argument goes straight at the show’s core assumption: that Mufasa’s kingship was simply his birthright and Scar’s seizure of it was an unnatural crime. In real prides, MatPat points out, dominant males often govern in pairs or small coalitions, splitting mating access and territorial defense rather than one male ruling alone by blood entitlement. Pride Rock’s single-king, single-heir setup is a human monarchy grafted onto animals that don’t actually organize that way.

Meaning Behind the Lion Mane

The film draws its hero and villain lines partly through color — Mufasa’s warm golden mane against Scar’s dark, scraggly one is coded as good versus sinister. Biologically, the video argues, that’s backward. Research on lion manes cited in the video ties darker coloration to elevated testosterone and stronger physical condition, and lionesses in the wild show a documented preference for males with darker manes as mates. By that measure, Scar’s appearance isn’t a mark of villainy; it’s closer to a certificate of fitness.

Under the actual rules lions live by, the dark mane wins the pride — not the golden one.

Succession By Force, Not By Blood

The most unsettling piece of the analysis is also the most grounded in field data: when a new male or coalition takes over a pride in the wild, the incoming males will often kill the cubs sired by the previous leader to bring the lionesses back into estrus faster and clear the way for their own offspring. Scar’s takeover — deposing Mufasa and pushing Simba out — tracks with exactly that pattern of forced pride succession. Judged against real lion behavior instead of Shakespearean plot logic, Scar isn’t the usurper breaking the natural order; he’s the male following it.

Rewriting The Circle Of Life

Taken together, the video’s case reframes “Circle of Life” as something closer to a marketing jingle than a biological law. Mufasa’s reign reads as the exception, not the rule, propped up by a storybook version of hierarchy that real prides don’t actually practice. Scar’s mane, his method, and his timing all match what wild lions do when a stronger male moves in on a pride — which is the entire argument MatPat built the episode around.

This isn’t the first time MatPat’s channels have taken a beloved franchise apart frame by frame to find the uncomfortable logic underneath — the same instinct shows up in Game Theory’s deep dives into the Afton family’s hidden timeline and the channel’s ongoing hunt for whether Golden Freddy is actually lurking in Security Breach. The Lion King video just happened to land the same week Disney’s remake was clearing $1 billion worldwide, giving MatPat’s zoology lesson a built-in audience already arguing about the movie in theater lobbies.