Greta Gerwig’s ‘Narnia’ Will Receive 2026 Theatrical Release Before Netflix Premiere

Netflix has approved a limited theatrical run for Greta Gerwig‘s forthcoming Chronicles of Narnia adaptation. The film will open in IMAX on November 26, 2026 for an exclusive period before premiering on the streaming platform on December 25, 2026.

The deal between Netflix and IMAX allows Narnia to screen internationally for two weeks. To take advantage of the window, the movie will be released in around 1,000 theaters across 90 countries. It will mark the largest theatrical release yet for the streaming platform, which rarely screens films in theaters. In 2022, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery was only screened for one week before being removed.

Narnia will join the growing list of knockout releases from Gerwig, who has enough leverage from her 2017 through 2023 run of Lady Bird, Little Women, and Barbie to call all of her own shots. Barbie alone brought in more than $1.4 billion globally. Before the film premiered, Gerwig was already attached to write and direct at least two Chronicles of Narnia films. They will mark the first since the C.S. Lewis book series was adapted into a three-piece film series released between 2005 and 2010.

Last year, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos told Time that Gerwig’s Narnia “won’t be counter to how the audience may have imagined those worlds but it will be bigger and bolder than they thought.”

The writer-director latched onto the dreamlike, faith-based allure of the fantasy series. “It’s connected to the folklore and fairy stories of England, but it’s a combination of different traditions,” she said. “As a child, you accept the whole thing—that you’re in this land of Narnia, there’s fauns, and then Father Christmas shows up. It doesn’t even occur to you that it’s not schematic. I’m interested in embracing the paradox of the worlds that Lewis created, because that’s what’s so compelling about them.”

Later this year, Gerwig will see the release of Snow White starring Rachel Zegler; she co-penned the screenplay for that live-action take. It’s the first time she hasn’t served as both writer and director since 2015’s Mistress America.

“I think probably every director has a fantasy baseball league in their head of what movies they want to make,” Gerwig told Rolling Stone in 2023. “And there’s some movies I’d like to make that require a big canvas. At the same time, I’ve seen so many directors move between bigger movies and smaller movies … I want to play in lots of different worlds. That’s the goal.”