Greta Gerwig Is Heading to Narnia in 2027 for ‘The Magician’s Nephew’ Movie

A few years after Greta Gerwig pulled off the unimaginable and turned Barbie into a feminist icon and box office hit, she’s turning her attention to C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia books. Her film, Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, will open in IMAX and traditional movie theaters on February 12 and stream on Netflix on April 2.

Gerwig wrote the screenplay and directed the movie, whose star-studded cast included David McKenna, Beatrice Campbell, Meryl Streep, Daniel Craig, Emma Mackey, and Carey Mulligan, among others. Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt wrote the score.

“I was a child when I first read The Magician’s Nephew, and I fell in love with the gorgeously improbable but completely brilliant concept of a cosmic lion singing the world of Narnia to life,” Gerwig said in a statement. “I didn’t know that I would grow up to make films, but a universe built out of music is an idea that always lived in my heart. It is the honor of a lifetime to be asked to imagine it into being.”

Although The Magician’s Nephew (1955) was the sixth of the seven Chronicles of Narnia books to be published, its story is set earliest in the chronology of the septet. The plot reveals how Narnia came into being, as Gerwig’s quote hints, and sets up the events in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), the first book in the series. The latter book has twice been adapted into films, first by the BBC in 1988 across six episodes, and again in 2005 for a two-hour–plus movie that featured Tilda Swinton, Liam Neeson, and others. Both the BBC and Disney and Fox produced two sequels, Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Gerwig’s The Magician’s Nephew marks the first time this book has been adapted into a movie.

“Because of C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, I believed in magic and hidden worlds and adventure,” Gerwig said. “I believed that anywhere could be enchanted and that anyone could be swept up into an epic. That wonder and awe was available to everyone, even ordinary people like me … it transformed me.”
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Gerwig’s Barbie was a box-office smash, bringing in $1.4 billion. Her screenplay was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards. She has previously received screenplay nominations for Little Women and the original film, Lady Bird, for which she also received a Best Director nomination.

“I think probably every director has a fantasy baseball league in their head of what movies they want to make,” Gerwig told Rolling Stone, generally about what she would like to do as a filmmaker, in 2023. “And there’s some movies I’d like to make that require a big canvas. … I want to play in lots of different worlds. That’s the goal.”