Recommendations of the Editorial team
A few years after Greta Gerwig did the unimaginable and made Barbie a feminist icon and a box office hit, she is now turning her back C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia to. Her film “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” opens in IMAX and regular cinemas on February 12th and can be seen on Netflix from April 2nd.
Gerwig wrote the screenplay and directed. The star-studded ensemble includes, among others, Meryl Streep, Daniel Craig, Emma Mackey and Carey Mulligan. The film’s music is by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt.
“I was just a child when I first read The Magician’s Nephew, and I fell in love with the wonderfully far-fetched but completely ingenious concept of a cosmic lion singing the world of Narnia into existence,” Gerwig said in a statement. “I didn’t know back then that I would make films – but a universe created from music is an idea that has always been close to my heart. It is the honor of my life to have been asked to bring it to life.”
Narnia’s origin story
Although The Magician’s Nephew (1955) appeared as the sixth of the seven Chronicles of Narnia books, its plot takes place earliest in the chronology of the seven.
The story explains how Narnia came to be – as Gerwig’s quote suggests – and thus lays the foundation for the events in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” (1950), the first volume in the series. This book has been made into a film twice: first in 1988 by the BBC in six episodes, then in 2005 as a two-hour-plus film starring Tilda Swinton, Liam Neeson and others. The BBC, Disney and Fox each produced two sequels, Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Gerwig’s “The Magician’s Nephew” is the first film adaptation of this book ever.
“C.S. Lewis’ ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ made me believe in magic, hidden worlds and adventure,” said Gerwig. “I believed that any place could be enchanted and that any person could be drawn into a great epic. This wonder and awe was accessible to everyone, even ordinary people like me…it changed me.”
Gerwig’s “Barbie” was a gigantic box office success, grossing $1.4 billion. Her screenplay was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards. She previously received screenplay nominations for “Little Women” and the original “Lady Bird,” for which she was also nominated for best director.
Gerwig’s desire for a big screen
“I think pretty much every director has a sort of fantasy baseball league in their head of films that they would like to make,” Gerwig told Rolling Stone in 2023 about her plans as a filmmaker. “And there are films I want to make that need a big screen. … I want to play in very different worlds. That’s the goal.”