No Sets. No Cameras. No Worries.

For Disney's remake of the Lion King, Director Jon Favreau shot the film inside virtual reality. he doesn’t quite know what to call the result, but it looks like a real movie— and the future of cinema.

- Peter Rubin

For the 26 million people who watched friends in the mid-'90s, Jon Favreau was Pete Becker. Not the star filmmaker who would make Elf a holiday classic; or who'd launch the Marvel juggernaut by directing Iron Man; or who'd update The Jungle Book for the CGI generation.

Just Becker, a tech whiz who – before wooing Monica in a six-episode arc – had become a gazillionaire by creating a piece of business software called Moss 865. It was so named for a reason. Moss 1 exploded. Moss 2 would only schedule appointments for January. Becker, convinced his idea would change the world, pressed on. Today, it's hard to describe Favreau's latest project, the much-anticipated Lion King remake, without thinking of Pete Becker.

In fact, it's hard to describe the film at all.

There are some obvious facts, sure. The Lion King is the next installment in Disney's series of reworked animation classics, which includes not just The Jungle Book but also live-action updates of Cinderella and Aladdin. The film's Bambi-meets-Hamlet plot, in which an African lion cub named Simba flees his savanna-ruling family after his father's death, is nearly identical to the 1994 megahit that remains the highest-earning G-rated movie of all time. James Earl Jones reprises his role as the murdered king Mufasa, joined this time around by Chiwetel Ejiofor, Beyoncé, Donald Glover, Seth Rogen, and others. If you've seen the trailer, there's one other obvious fact: The new Lion King rides an atomically thin line between CGI animation and live action.