Greta Gerwig’s Narnia trailer goes psychedelic with Bowie inspiration
After Barbie grossed nearly $1.5 billion at the box office in 2023, director Greta Gerwig could have picked virtually any project — and she chose to adapt C.S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew for Netflix, the sixth Narnia novel but a prequel to the rest of the series. Netflix has now released the first trailer, scored to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," and it is a strikingly psychedelic affair. Gerwig has been publicly reticent about the film, but has said she drew inspiration from 1960s-era David Bowie, while insisting it will not be a musical.
The book's existence owes to a single question: after publishing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in 1950, Lewis was asked by an acquaintance how a London lamppost came to stand in Narnia's woodland, and he wrote the prequel to answer it — completing it only in 1955, after four other Narnia books. On screen, the last major adaptations were the early 2000s film versions of the first three novels, which earned diminishing returns before the rights lapsed in 2011. Gerwig has shifted the story's setting from 1900 to postwar 1950s London, where Digory Kirke (David McKenna) and his neighbor Polly Plummer (Beatrice Campbell) are tricked by Digory's eccentric uncle Andrew Ketterley (Daniel Craig) into journeying through magic rings, accidentally freeing the evil empress Jadis (Emma Mackey, Physicist Barbie in Barbie) from a sleeping spell. The cast also includes Carey Mulligan, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Ciaran Hinds as the adult Digory, and Meryl Streep voicing Aslan.
The film opens in theaters on February 12, 2027, and begins streaming on Netflix on April 2, 2027 — the first Netflix production to receive a wide theatrical release. Gerwig holds a two-picture deal for Netflix's Narnia series, suggesting The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe could follow next.
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