Hans Zimmer Trades Simba for Real Lions

National Geographic has set the scoring team for its upcoming documentary series Lion, and the headline nearly writes itself: Hans Zimmer, working with Bleeding Fingers Music composers Niccolò Pacella and George Hutson Warren, with additional vocals from the Nairobi Chamber Chorus and contributions from Lebo M and Andrew Christie. Zimmer won his first Academy Award for an animated lion thirty years ago. Now he is scoring the real animals in the real places, and he is bringing back the voice that opened 'Circle of Life.' It reads like a nostalgia play. It isn't. It is the most logical hire in television music right now.

The Zimmer and Lebo M partnership runs deeper than one film. They first collaborated on The Power of One in 1992, and when The Lion King arrived two years later, it was Lebo M, a Soweto-born singer and composer, whose opening call became one of the most recognizable vocal entrances in film history. Zimmer's score took the Oscar, the soundtrack went multi-platinum, and the stage adaptation is still running. Zimmer waited until Dune in 2022 for a second statue. Lebo M returned to open the 2019 remake, because no one else could. So when his name appears on a project called Lion, understand what it means: for two generations of viewers, his voice is what lions sound like. No marketing department could buy that association, and no other vocalist could supply it.

The credit structure tells you how the score will actually get made. Zimmer's name tops the marquee, but Bleeding Fingers, the custom scoring shop he co-founded with Russell Emanuel and Steve Kofsky, has become the house band for prestige natural history: Planet Earth II, Blue Planet II, Seven Worlds One Planet, Prehistoric Planet. The workflow is settled. Zimmer writes or co-writes the thematic suite, and staff composers like Pacella and Warren adapt it across hours of footage, episode by episode. That division of labor is not a knock on the staffers. It is how a multi-part series stays coherent without burying one composer under hundreds of cues. For Pacella and Warren, a co-credit beside Zimmer on a National Geographic flagship is the sort of line that moves a composer from staff rooms toward marquee billing.

What the music has to do is harder than it looks. A nature series needs a main theme that survives repetition across episodes without turning into wallpaper, hunt sequences with genuine pulse that do not collapse into action-movie pastiche, and long stretches of restraint where the score sits under narration and leaves the savanna's own sound intact. And a single-species series lives or dies on family material — cubs, prides, loss — which needs warmth without sentimentality. The cheap route with African material is library percussion and a generic world-choir patch. Bringing in the Nairobi Chamber Chorus points the other way: real voices from the region, giving the score a locality that samples cannot fake. African singers on an African story should not be remarkable. In this industry, it still is.

National Geographic has hired film composers rather than library houses for its marquee titles for years. Marco Beltrami scored Free Solo; Daniel Pemberton scored The Rescue. Both of those scores got the kind of attention documentary music rarely earns. Lion continues that pattern and raises the stakes, pointing a franchise-level team at a single-species story. It also flips the usual direction of influence. Documentary music spent decades borrowing the vocabulary that Hollywood built from African sources. Here, the people who built that vocabulary are applying it to footage of actual cats in actual landscapes. Andrew Christie's name on the credit list rounds out a team built for both scale and detail, which is exactly what a series like this demands.

For composers and curators, the takeaway is the template: a marquee name, a specialist shop handling the episodic load, and regional vocal talent instead of stock patches. Expect a theme or suite released ahead of the premiere, since that is the standard Bleeding Fingers playbook, and expect the album to perform well beyond the film-music niche, where Zimmer's catalog already sits heavy on cinematic and focus playlists. Programmers will place the theme beside his Lion King cues whether he wants them to or not. Thirty years after first setting a lion to music, he is not taking a victory lap. He is working the corner of television where the most ambitious scoring now happens, and Lion just became its highest-profile test case. Watch how it sounds.