The trailer is coming later this evening – Netflix releases it at 7pm BST, and we’ll add it here as soon as it lands.
For a series that starts with children walking into a wardrobe, Narnia has spent a remarkably long time stuck in the cupboard. The last film, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, sailed off in 2010. Since then there have been rights deals, a Silver Chair that never quite got out of its chair, and a great deal of waiting. Now Netflix has posted the first poster for Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, and the first trailer arrives at 7pm BST on Tuesday, 13 October. The poster is a giant star-filled Aslan in profile, two children aloft on a winged horse and the tagline “A Universe Begins”. Subtle it isn’t, but it is accurate.
The dates are also confirmed. The film opens in cinemas and IMAX on 12 February 2027, with IMAX sneak previews from 10 February, and arrives on Netflix on 2 April 2027. It is Netflix’s first wide theatrical release, which says something about a streamer that once treated cinemas the way the White Witch treated Christmas. Sony is handling the theatrical release outside North America. Its original 26 November IMAX slot went to The Adventures of Cliff Booth, so Narnia gets an extra winter.
The cast is suitably grand. David McKenna and Beatrice Campbell play Digory and Polly. Emma Mackey (Sex Education) is Jadis, the future White Witch. Daniel Craig plays Uncle Andrew, and Carey Mulligan, Ciarán Hinds, Denise Gough, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith and Susan Wokoma also appear. According to Empire’s first look in September, Meryl Streep voices Aslan, a lion that Gerwig has designed with a nod to David Bowie, down to odd-coloured eyes. Gerwig has also moved the London scenes from the book’s 1900 to the 1950s, called the whole thing a rock opera with The Who and Bowie as touchstones, and offered a tidy summary of her theory: “Narnia is literally a world made out of music.” Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, who wrote Barbie‘s songs with her, are scoring.
This sounds like the sort of idea that would make a C.S. Lewis society chairman reach for his pipe. In fact it is closer to the book than it seems. In The Magician’s Nephew (1955), Aslan doesn’t build Narnia with a wave of his paw. He sings it into existence: stars, grass, trees and talking beasts arriving on cue, like the world’s most ambitious concept album. A director who thinks the creation of Narnia needs a proper soundtrack has at least read the right chapter.
The book has always been the odd one out among Lewis’s Chronicles, and the most interesting. Published sixth and set first, it is the series’ origin story and frequently a science-fiction novel in a fantasy’s coat. Uncle Andrew is a mad scientist who tests his magic rings on guinea pigs and then on children. The rings lead to the Wood Between the Worlds, a quiet forest of pools, each one a gateway to another universe. Lewis was running a multiverse hub long before Marvel had a phase. One of those pools leads to Charn, a dead world whose queen ended a war by speaking the Deplorable Word and wiping out every living thing except herself. Lewis wrote that a decade after Hiroshima, and the 1950s setting can only make the bomb-shaped shadow longer.
Gerwig calls Uncle Andrew “the stupidest magician in the world who actually made magic”. Craig, asked about the character, said: “I’d like to say that his intentions are good, but I’m not sure that they are.” Readers will remember that Andrew’s reward for opening a door to other worlds is to be mistaken for a tree by the newly talking animals and planted in the ground. It is a long way from Bond, but at least they didn’t put him in a tuxedo first.
There are plenty of book moments to watch for: Jadis loose in London, wrenching the crossbar off a lamp-post; that iron bar taking root in Narnia’s fresh soil; and an apple whose tree eventually becomes a certain wardrobe. Book purists will be checking that the cab horse Strawberry still becomes Fledge, and the poster suggests he has. With a reported $200 million budget and a shoot spread across London, Manchester, Shepperton and Longcross, this is also a very British production. It is pleasing that the world’s most famous wardrobe is still being built at home.
Whether a rock-opera Narnia with a Bowie-eyed lion works is a question for February. But Lewis began his world with a song, and this is the first adaptation that seems to have noticed. Things could be worse. Somebody could have asked the Deplorable Word to write the lyrics.
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