It’s so difficult to get right that some adaptations have been erased from history.
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis is one of the most influential fantasy series of the 20th Century, impacting works from Harry Potter to The Magicians and countless others that have been built off the tropes he popularized. Over the last 70 decades, following the printing of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, there have been 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 that comprise The Chronicles of Narnia to life is a difficult challenge, with the first three following the same characters before veering wildly into side stories and a prequel. At the same time, the Christian narrative that informs the fantasy world is a hard tone to get correct without leaning too far into it or pulling back and losing the meaning C.S. Lewis put into his stories. Because of this lack of a straightforward narrative across all seven novels, it’s hard 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, taking 10 episodes to tell the story of the first novel. Today, it’s been lost, and no known complete versions still exist. The second adaptation fared much better, and in fact, it 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; even if the sequence with Aslan sacrificing himself was terrifying to me at the time, it made me curious about the other books. Sadly, CBS, despite the smart, creative choice of using animation, never touched the rest of The Chronicles of Narnia.
Nearly a decade later, the BBC took a crack at The Chronicles of Narnia as a live-action series that was widely praised and was incredibly successful, but there’s a catch. This time, the second and third books, Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, were mashed together into one six-episode season, which did wonders in cutting out some of the bloat and increasing the pacing of the stories. The BBC went on to adapt the fourth book, The Silver Chair, stopping short of the whole series, as that was all they had the rights for. Then again, no one at the network seemed to be fighting all that hard for the remaining novels.
Disney Attempts Narnia
C.S. Lewis may have been a talented writer, but he took his time getting to the point, and it’s right there, in the second and third novels, that most of the audience starts to lose interest in the world of Narnia. This was the problem Disney ran into when, in 2005, for the first time, The Chronicles of Narnia went Hollywood with a big-budget adaptation featuring Liam Neeson as the voice of Aslan the Lion. The first film, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, was a smash hit and, in 2005, was Disney’s largest opening for a movie ever at $105 million, but that momentum soon faded.
Prince Caspian, with the returning stars of the original, was going to be bigger and more action-packed than the first film, with Disney even adding a Prince Caspian meet and greet to the Hollywood Studios theme park. Ironically, the film was released between two massive releases, Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, both Disney films. It made money for the studio, but less than the first, continuing the trend of The Chronicles of Narnia audience fading away as the story of the Pevensie children gets less screen time.
For The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Disney 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 earned $415 million worldwide in 2010, which isn’t bad, and was enough to be Fox’s top movie for the year, but the signs of audience disinterest were there, as it only made $100 million domestically, lagging behind the first two films. The Magician’s Nephew, the story of the creation of Narnia, was announced as the next film, but the rights expired, and the estate of C.S. Lewis 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 spot 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 becoming, potentially, too “in your face” for The Last Battle, which includes a fake Aslan as an Anti-Christ stand-in to appeal to the masses. But to get there, Christian families are left behind because of the preceding books, so in the end, the appeal to everyone becomes an appeal to no one.
I want Greta Gerwig and Netflix to succeed, if only so that I can finally see The Magician’s Nephew adapted into live-action. If any company can pull off the complete series, it’s Netflix, which doesn’t need box office numbers, only curious eyeballs on a streaming service most people are already subscribed to.
The Chronicles of Narnia is one of the biggest fantasy franchises that has yet to be fully adapted, right alongside The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. In a world where we’re getting Harry Potter, again, 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.
