How do you follow up making a shockingly successful movie about an American icon? If you’re Barbie writer/director Greta Gerwig, you take all that goodwill over to Netflix to launch their planned series of movies based on C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Gerwig, whose job on the series was announced not long after Barbie blew up at the box office this summer, has committed to doing at least two movies for the streaming giant. She previously said that she was “terrified” by the prospect of making the films, which are slated to start filming this year.
Netflix acquired the rights to the Narnia series back in 2018, striking a deal that gave them the license for film and television. The Narnia rights, coupled with their purchase of Roald Dahl’s library, has given the streamer a deep bench of beloved kids’ content.
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“I’m slightly in the place of terror because I really do have such reverence for Narnia,” Gerwig told BBC Radio 4’s Today (via Deadline). “I loved Narnia so much as a child. As an adult, C.S. Lewis is a thinker and a writer. I’m intimidated by doing this. It’s something that feels like a worthy thing to be intimidated by.”
The filmmaker added, “As a non-British person, I feel a particular sense of wanting to do it correctly… it’s like when Americans do Shakespeare, there’s a slight feeling of reverence and as if maybe we should treat it with extra care. It is not our countryman.”
Between 2005 and 2010, Walden Media produced a trio of Chronicles of Narnia films, adapting less than half of the seven books. Critical and box office reception to the franchise was mixed, and after the first two, Walden parted ways with original distributor Disney and started to work with Fox. A fourth film never got off the ground, but since Disney bought Fox, fans can watch all three of the 2000s-era Narnia adaptations on Disney+.
Since 2018, Netflix has remained relatively quiet on the property, outside of appointing Coco co-writer Matthew Aldrich as the lead architect of the endeavor. In November, rumors emerged that Netflix was hoping to get Gerwig to commit to launching the franchise.
Since they seem to want to expand the world out with TV, it is not immediately evident how slavishly the adaptations will follow the books. If they are pretty close to the source material, there are two likely starting points for the franchise: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first Narnia novel written by Lewis and the most famous installment of the franchise; and The Magician’s Nephew, the sixth novel Lewis wrote but, as a prequel, the first in The Chronicles of Narnia chronologically, and the one Lewis preferred to be read first. The Magician’s Nephew has never been adapted into live-action (it was to be the next film made in the Fox series after The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but the rights lapsed), which would give Netflix something fresh for viewers to enjoy without drawing comparisons to past adaptations.
