It’s so hard to get right that some adaptations have been erased from history.
from Jonathan Klotz
| Updated
The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis is one of the most influential fantasy series of the 20th century, spanning works from Harry Potter to The wizards and countless others that are built on the tropes he promotes. Over the past 7 decades, since the printing of the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobethere were attempts to adapt the series as both television movies 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?
Bringing the books they include The Chronicles of Narnia to life is a tough challenge, with the first three following the same characters before branching off into side stories and backstory. At the same time, the Christian narrative that informs the fantasy world is a difficult tone to get right without going too far into it or stepping back and losing the meaning that K. S. Lewis puts in his stories. This lack of a clear narrative throughout all seven novels makes it difficult to hold the audience’s interest, and why to this day no one has tackled the back half of the series.
The original adaptations of Narnia
The first adaptation of Narnia came in 1967, taking 10 episodes to tell the story of the first novel. It was today lostand no known complete versions yet exist. The second adaptation did much better and actually made history.
In 1979 CBS broadcasts The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a two-part TV movie, becoming the first animated TV movie in history and winning an Emmy in the process. This was my introduction to the world of Narnia; even if the Aslan self-sacrificing sequence was horrifying to me at the time, it made me interested in the other books. Unfortunately, CBS, despite the smart, creative choice to use animation, never touched the rest of The Chronicles of Narnia.
Nearly a decade later, the BBC snuck in The Chronicles of Narnia as an action series that was widely acclaimed and wildly successful, but there was a catch. This time the second and third books, Prince Caspian and The Dawnbringer’s Journeywere blended together into one six-episode season, which did wonders for reducing some of the bloat and increasing the pace of the stories. The BBC went on to adapt the fourth book, The silver chairstopping short of the entire series as that was all they had rights to. On the other hand, no one on the network seems to be fighting that hard for the remaining novels.
Disney tries Narnia
K. S. Lewis may have been a talented writer, but he was slow to get to the point, and it was there, in the second and third novels, that most of the audience began to lose interest in the world of Narnia. That was the problem Disney came across when in 2005 he first Chronicles of Narnia went to Hollywood with a big-budget adaptation featuring Liam Neeson as the voice of Aslan the lion. The first movie The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobewas a big hit in 2005 as well. was the biggest opening for a Disney film of all time with $105 million, but that momentum soon petered out.
Prince Caspian, with returning stars from the original, would be bigger and more action-packed than the first film, with Disney even adding a meet-and-greet with Prince Caspian at the Hollywood Studios theme park. Ironically, the film was released between two mainstream releases, Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skullboth Disney movies. It made money for the studio, but less than the first, continuing the trend of The Chronicles of Narnia audience fading as the story of the Pevensey children received less screen time.
For The Dawnbringer’s JourneyDisney decided to pull out and didn’t produce it, with Fox stepping in (which oddly means that after Disney bought the studio, all three are owned by Disney) and it grossed $415 million worldwide in 2010, which isn’t bad , and was enough to be Fox’s top film of the year, but the signs of audience disinterest were there as it only made $100 million domestically, trailing the first two the movie. The wizard’s nephewthe story of the creation of Narnia, was announced as the next film, but the rights expired and the CS Lewis estate had to find a new studio, which killed the project.
Why Narnia is an impossible challenge for Hollywood
The nature of The Chronicles of Narnia as a Christian allegory wrapped in high fantasy puts it in a unique place that, on paper, should translate into mass appeal. The problem with the loose narrative of the franchise is that the allegory fades and fades as the series progresses before becoming potentially too “in your face” for The final battlewhich features a fake Aslan as a stand-in for the Antichrist to appeal to the masses. But to get there, Christian families are left out because of the preceding books, so in the end the appeal to all becomes an appeal to none.
i want Greta Gerwig and Netflix to succeed, if only to see at last The wizard’s nephew adapted for live action. If any company can make the full series, it’s Netflix, which doesn’t need box office numbers, just curious eyeballs on streaming a service that most people are already subscribed to.
The Chronicles of Narnia is one of the biggest fantasy franchises yet to be fully adapted, right next to The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. In a world we are becoming Harry Potteragain it would be refreshing for something new and different.
Then again, given how much Netflix likes to cancel shows after Season 3, we might get the first Chronicles of Narnia books again and nothing else.
