The Oscar-winning composer wrote music for the 1994 original and also worked on last year’s remake.
He told Edith Bowman on the Play Next podcast that the first Lion King film “had a miserable budget because nobody believed in it, nobody thought it was going to do anything”.
Zimmer added that he wanted to “fix a few things” in his original score.
He said: “That’s a dangerous thing because you can ruin things when you try to fix them as well.
“But there were a couple of things that have always nagged me and bugged me in my writing, that I wanted to just go and, you know, sort out a bit.”
The remake of the film featured musical performances from Beyonce.
Zimmer said he felt that, when doing the remake, he “owed that story to Africa a bit more, I felt I owed that story to African-American musicians”.
He said an orchestra was put together “that was fabulously balanced in culture and everything, and that was just a sheer joy”.
Zimmer added that the original film was made shortly before Nelson Mandela was released from prison “and everything changed”.
“There was something important about that, it was done at a moment which changed the world,” he said.
The composer also discussed the difficulties with doing his job amid the coronavirus pandemic, saying that working across time zones presents issues.
“I’m working all over the world,” he said.
“My director right now is in eastern Europe, some of my musicians are in Vienna … so it gets completely confusing who’s doing what, when.”
