As Sarah wrote in the previous post about the new The Lion King teaser, Beyoncé is credited as: 

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It kinda became a thing on Twitter. Sarah said she has Questions about the double-barrel name. Since B doesn’t answer questions anymore, we have to speculate. 

As Sarah posited, this may be how Beyoncé wants to differentiate between Beyoncé on stage and Beyoncé in character, Beyoncé the greatest entertainer of her generation and Beyoncé the actor. (We won’t talk too much right now about Beyoncé’s, um, acting skills because I have plans tonight and I don't want to be in danger.) That’s probably the safest assumption. 

Could it also be about her kids? This is the version of The Lion King that Blue Ivy, Sir, and Rumi will know the way most of us know the 1994 version. They will grow up with and to this movie. I mean of course they know that their mother is BEYONCÉ. But this may be a gesture, for her children, so that they’ll always be connected, so that one day, perhaps, she can tell them that they were part of the film through her, and their shared name is the literal manifestation of that. 

The full name is even more notable because of its placement – near the end, second last, preceded by the “with”. I f-cking love the credit business and I wish more people would talk about it, specifically the negotiations. Beyoncé is “Nala” who isn’t a minor character but she’s not a major character either. The “with” and the “and” in film and TV credits comes up most often these days when it’s a Big Name with a smaller part and it’s usually spelled out in the contract. Of course Beyoncé would have wanted it this way. Why would Beyoncé want to be hanging out in alphabetical order with the likes of Seth Rogen and John Oliver? I can’t see Disney objecting about it either. Why wouldn’t you want to highlight and make as obvious as possible that Beyoncé is in your movie? Especially when they’re probably paying her lot of money to be in the movie. I doubt, then, that there was much haggling here on that point. That said, it’s not always smooth. And this is what I mean about wanting to know more – this is the work sh-t that is so good for gossip: when ego is involved and must be bartered over in black and white text, in official documentation. Remember in school when we had to do group assignments? Like “The Theory of Evolution by Jennifer Connor, Elaine Lui, and Ramon Santiago”. What if I told Jennifer and Ramon that I wanted the cover page to look like this instead… 

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… because I was the better public speaker and would nail the presentation part of the project?

It’s a serious question. Would that make me an asshole?