It’s so hard to get right that some customizations have been erased from history.
Of Jonathan Klotz
| Updated
The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis is one of the most influential fantasy series of the 20th century, influencing works from Harry Potter to The magicians and countless others that have been built from the tropes he popularized. In the last 7 decades, after the printing of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobeattempts have been made to adapt the series as both television films and feature films, with diminishing returns.
Barbie director Greta Gerwig is working on the latest adaptation for Netflix, the first studio to license all seven novels, so will they be the first to break the curse and find success? Or will the next adaptation suffer the same fate as the previous ones?
Bring the books included The Chronicles of Narnia to Life is a difficult challenge, with the first three following the same characters before wildly branching into side stories and a prequel. At the same time, the Christian narrative that informs the fantasy world is a difficult tone to get right without leaning too far into it or retreating and losing the meaning CS Lewis put into his stories. Because of this lack of a single story across all seven novels, it’s difficult to keep an audience interested, and why, to this day, no one has tackled the back half of the series.
The original Narnia adaptations
The first Narnia adaptation came in 1967, and it took 10 episodes to tell the story of the first novel. Today it has been lostand no known complete versions still exist. The second adaptation fared much better, and in fact made history.
In 1979, CBS aired The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a two-part television movie, becoming the first animated television movie in history and winning an Emmy in the process. It was my introduction to the world of Narnia; although the sequence of Aslan sacrificing himself was terrifying to me at the time, it made me curious about the other books. Unfortunately, despite the smart, creative choice to use animation, CBS never touched the rest of The Chronicles of Narnia.
Almost a decade later, the BBC took a crack at The Chronicles of Narnia as a live-action series that received much praise and was incredibly successful, but there is a catch. This time, the second and third books, Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treaderwas mashed together into a six-episode season, which did wonders by cutting out some of the bloat and increasing the pace of the stories. The BBC went on to adapt the fourth book, The silver chairstop the whole series, because that’s all they had the rights to. Again, no one at the network seemed to be fighting that hard for the remaining novels.
Disney is trying Narnia
CS Lewis may have been a talented writer, but he took his time getting to the point, and it is right there, in the second and third novels, that most of the audience begins to lose interest in the world of Narnia. This was the problem Disney encountered when, in 2005, for the first time, The Chronicles of Narnia went to Hollywood with a big-budget adaptation with Liam Neeson as the voice of Aslan the Lion. The first film, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobewas a smash hit and in 2005 was Disney’s biggest opening ever for a film at $105 million, but that momentum soon faded.
Prince Caspian, featuring the returning stars of the original, would be bigger and more action-packed than the first film, with Disney even adding a Prince Caspian hit to the Hollywood Studios theme park. Ironically, the film was released between two massive releases, Iron Man and Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skullboth Disney movies. It made money for the studio, but less than the first, and continues the trend of The Chronicles of Narnia audience disappearing as the story of the Pevensie children gets less screen time.
For The Voyage of the Dawn TreaderDisney decided to step back and didn’t produce it, with Fox stepping in (which oddly means that after Disney bought the studio, all three are Disney properties), and it grossed $415 million worldwide in 2010, which isn’t bad , and was enough to be Fox’s top movie of the year, but the signs of audience disinterest were there, as it only made $100 million domestically, trailing the first two the movies. The wizard’s nephewthe story of the creation of Narnia, was announced as the next film, but the rights expired, and CS Lewis’ estate had to find a new studio, killing the project.
Why Narnia is an impossible challenge for Hollywood
The Chronicles of Narnia’s character as a Christian allegory wrapped in high fantasy puts it in a unique place that, on paper, should translate to mass appeal. The problem with the loose narrative of the franchise is that the allegory fades in and out as the series goes on before potentially becoming too “in your face” for The final battlewhich includes a fake Aslan as an antichrist effort to appeal to the masses. But to get there, Christian families are left behind because of the previous books, so in the end the appeal to all becomes an appeal to none.
I want Greta Gerwig and Netflix to succeed, if only so that I can finally see The wizard’s nephew adapted to live-action. If any company can pull off the entire series, it’s Netflix, which doesn’t need box office numbers, just curious eyeballs on one streaming service most people already subscribe to.
The Chronicles of Narnia is one of the greatest fantasy series yet to be fully adapted, right next to The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. In a world where we are heading Harry Potteragain, it would be refreshing for something new and different.
Then again, given how Netflix loves to cancel shows after Season 3, we might get the first Chronicles of Narnia books again, and nothing else.
