Hans Zimmer, Lebo M Reunite for 'Lion'

National Geographic has set the music team for Lion, its new original documentary series, and the headline is hard to ignore: Hans Zimmer will score the show alongside Bleeding Fingers Music composers Niccolò Pacella and George Hutson Warren, with additional music from Lebo M and Andrew Christie and vocals from the Nairobi Chamber Chorus. The symmetry is almost too neat. Zimmer won his first Academy Award for 1994's The Lion King, and the first voice you hear on 'Circle of Life' — that opening call before the sun comes up over Pride Rock — belongs to Lebo M. Thirty years later, both men are back on lion material. The difference is that this time the subjects don't sing; they hunt, starve, fight, and raise cubs on camera.

Anyone who follows television scoring knows how a project like this actually gets built. Zimmer's name leads the credit, and his job is the thematic spine — the main title, the suites, the musical identity. Bleeding Fingers, the composer collective he co-founded, then carries that material across every hour of picture. It's the same division of labor that produced Planet Earth II, Blue Planet II, Seven Worlds One Planet, Frozen Planet II, and Prehistoric Planet, and it means Pacella and Warren are not doing assistant work here. A co-scoring credit on a flagship natural history series is among the most valuable currency in the field right now. Jacob Shea, David Fleming, Kara Talve, and Anže Rozman all turned exactly this kind of Bleeding Fingers credit into thriving solo careers. Watch Pacella and Warren's names; that's how this pipeline keeps working.

The Lebo M involvement is the detail worth sitting with. The South African composer and singer didn't just open The Lion King — he shaped its vocal language, carried that work into the Broadway production, and has spent a career as the bridge between South African choral tradition and Hollywood scoring. Pairing him with the Nairobi Chamber Chorus, a working Kenyan choir, points to a score built on real African voices recorded as a featured element, not a library patch labeled 'Africa' dropped in for color. That matters musically. Language, tuning, call-and-response phrasing — these aren't textures you can fake convincingly with a generic epic-choir sample. Zimmer has always preferred building bespoke palettes for big subjects, and putting Lebo M and a Nairobi choir at the center suggests the savanna here will sound like a place, not a mood.

It's also worth remembering what scoring a natural history series actually demands, because it's a different discipline than features. A film gives you one arc over two hours; a series like this gives you hours of picture built from discrete set pieces — hunts, territorial fights, cub-rearing, drought, the slow grind of the dry season — each needing tension and release while leaving room for narration. The writing has to be modular: themes that survive being stretched to a whisper under a stalking sequence and then driven hard under a chase, cues that can duck and breathe around voiceover without dissolving into wallpaper. That's the real craft test for Pacella and Warren. Zimmer's suites set the grammar; the episode composers have to make it hold up across hundreds of minutes of footage, week after week, without the audience ever feeling the seams.

For curators, the commercial angle is bigger than it looks. Natural history scores are quietly some of the most-streamed instrumental music in the world — the Planet Earth II and Blue Planet II albums still anchor focus, study, and cinematic playlists years after broadcast, and Disney's nature slate has trained audiences to treat these scores as standalone listening. Expect a full soundtrack release alongside the series, and expect it to have a long playlist tail. For working composers, the story is the pipeline: Bleeding Fingers remains one of the few reliable on-ramps from team credits to top-tier scoring work, and each new Nat Geo series restocks the ladder. This is what a healthy corner of the industry looks like — established names, rising names, and local musicians all on one call sheet.

When Lion premieres, listen past the main title. The tells will be in the episode scores — how the themes flex across moods, where Lebo M and the Nairobi Chamber Chorus sit against the orchestra, and whose names scroll in the end credits. Zimmer coming back to lions thirty years after Pride Rock is a good story. What the next generation does with his themes is the better one.