Fall may have just gotten here, but if you’re ready to step through the wardrobe into a wintry wonderland, you might have the opportunity soon. Netflix has announced that it will be adapting C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia into a series of new original films.
It feels like just yesterday that Disney adapted the series of fantasy novels, written by C.S. Lewis, into a series of movies that began with 2005’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and also included Prince Caspian in 2008 and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 2010. Disney’s fourth Narnia film, The Silver Chair, was supposed to start filming this year. Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham assures that fans have been clamoring for more. “It is wonderful to know that folks from all over are looking forward to seeing more of Narnia, and that the advances in production and distribution technology have made it possible for us to make Narnian adventures come to life all over the world,” he said in a statement.
The franchise follows the four Pevensie children—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—escaping from their home in England into a magical alternate reality during World War II. They encounter such creatures as a half-human half-goat faun named Mr. Tumnus, the evil, manipulative White Witch, and Aslan, a wise and noble lion.
Though it is not yet known exactly how many films will comprise the new Netflix project, producer Mark Gordon mentioned “multiple projects” and “both stellar feature-length and episodic programming.” The Chronicles of Narnia is comprised of seven fantasy novels, so surely source material will not be an issue for the production.
I still have a lot of questions: Will the Netflix adaptation take the series in places Disney never did? Will this Prince Caspian be nearly as hot as the Disney one was? Will Edmund still make the mistake of eating the Turkish Delight? (Probably.) We’ll have to wait and see.