Greta Gerwig’s Narnia Trailer Takes a Psychedelic Turn With “Stairway to Heaven”
After Barbie became a nearly $1.5 billion box-office hit in 2023, director Greta Gerwig could have made almost any movie she wanted. Instead, she chose to adapt The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis’s sixth novel in The Chronicles of Narnia series, for Netflix.
Gerwig has said little publicly about the film beyond noting that it was inspired by 1960s David Bowie, while also clarifying that it is not a musical. Netflix has now released a trailer set to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” and the result is a strikingly psychedelic take on the world of Narnia.
The story behind The Magician’s Nephew
The first book in the series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published in 1950. Lewis initially had no intention of writing additional Chronicles of Narnia books. That changed after an acquaintance asked how London street lamps had been installed in the middle of a Narnian forest.
The question intrigued Lewis enough to inspire a prequel, The Magician’s Nephew, which explores the origins of the world of Narnia and explains the presence of the lamp in the forest. Lewis found the book difficult to complete, however, and wrote the other four Chronicles of Narnia novels before finishing it in 1955.
Netflix’s new Narnia adaptation
The Chronicles of Narnia has been adapted several times across different forms of media. Most recently, a film series adapted the first three novels in the early 2000s.
Box-office revenue for those films declined, and the film rights expired by 2011. There were originally plans to adapt the fourth novel, The Silver Chair, as an anime, but that project did not move forward.
Source: arstechnica.com