Greta Gerwig Broke Netflix

Here’s a fun game to play with those around you: Name the most-watched Netflix original movie of 2024. [30 seconds are ticking …] Sorry! Time’s up! The answer was the Millie Bobby Brown–starring Damsel, which Netflix says was watched 143 million times last year. Without a movie being in theaters (or getting any marketing), it’s hard for it to matter. Well, Greta Gerwig was not going to let that fate befall her upcoming follow-up to Barbie, the first movie in a planned series of adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, with a four-week-long “just theatrical” window, according to a Puck report. Imax has reportedly agreed, thus far, to exclusively play the movie for two weeks, though it’s open to a third if demand is there. Gerwig is apparently going to shoot the Narnia film with both regular and Imax cameras to appease both companies.

The film will open in those Imax screens on Thanksgiving Day, 2026, and won’t be available on Netflix until Christmas. Plus, Netflix will market the movie as a theatrical film and call it a Netflix/Imax movie. It will be the first Netflix movie to have any of that — even Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery played theaters for only five days. All that to say, Netflix might just be making a movie that people actually care to talk about (instead of just licensing one). Maybe the burn of losing Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights because it refused to commit to a theatrical release stung too bad to shake.