Once upon a time, to coin a phrase, an announcement that one of my favourite books was being adapted for the big screen was an occasion of great anticipation. These days, the only thing I feel is dread.
Oddly, Peter Jackson sits at both ends of that spectrum. When it was announced that the director of Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles was helming a cinematic trilogy of The Lord of the Rings, it first seemed an odd choice: until I recalled The Frighteners. The sense of anticipation was duly borne out. But then Jackson made The Hobbit travesties, dulled-down King Kong (my favourite movie) and, unforgivably, utterly butchered the wonderful Mortal Engines.
The years since have only got worse and worse, with abominations like Rings of Power. Still, some still manage to surprise pleasantly, such as the Netflix live-action One Piece series.
So, when it was announced that Netflix were adapting The Chronicles of Narnia, books I’ve loved since I still counted my age in single digits, all I could feel was dread. When it was further announced that Greta Gerwig was directing, trepidation turned to sick certainty that utter awfulness was incoming.
Nothing since has dispelled that sense of dread. Race-swapping the first king and queen of Narnia was bad enough. Gender-swapping Aslan was even worse: it was an utter insult to Lewis’ creation. It’s often misunderstood that Aslan is an ‘allegory’, or ‘symbolic’, of Jesus Christ. He’s not: he literally is Jesus Christ. Not only is that plain in the texts (in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aslan tells Lucy and Edmund that, in our world, “I have another name”), in letters, Lewis spelled it out unambiguously: Aslan is how Jesus manifests in a world of talking animals.
Recent announcements, poster images and, notoriously, the first trailer have made it even more plain what an abomination this will be. Gerwig prattles about Aslan as David Bowie, bringing “rock’n’roll” to a The Magician’s Nephew England for some reason brought forward in time, from the Victorian era to the 1950s. Jadis, the future White Witch, is portrayed as a diminutive reject from a ’70s rock musical, instead of the towering Queen of Charn. Further showing Gerwig’s utter misunderstanding of the novel, Jadis is shown using magic in London, when the novel explicitly stated that her magic did not work in our world. All set, for no adequately explained reason, to an ear-grating cover of “Stairway to Heaven”.
Adding insult to injury, Gerwig shows Jadis blowing up the Eagle and Child pub, the meeting-place of Lewis’s and J R R Tolkien’s literary circle, the Inklings. Subtlety is not her forte.
So, I’d long resolved never to waste a cent on watching it, in cinemas or on streaming. (To those who bleat, ‘It isn’t out yet, how do you know it will be bad?’, I would respond that, if I saw the chef drop a turd in the saucepan, I wouldn’t for an instant even taste the finished dish.)
But, the way things are going, I may not even have to bother avoiding it. It’s rapidly becoming a moot point whether the Gerwig Narnia will ever darken the cinema screen. Rumours are thick that the production is in massive trouble. Budgets are exploding, in-fights are spilling over, extensive re-shoots have been ordered and the release date has been shifted from the prime Thanksgiving weekend this year to the dead zone of February, 2027. The trailer has notched up three times as many dislikes as likes, and fans are comparing it to the worst of Marvel slop. Even industry insiders are calling it “mega woke slop insanity” and “awful”.
The first mistake was thinking Barbie’s success made Greta Gerwig some kind of filmmaking genius. The movie made a billion dollars, so naturally she’s the next Peter Jackson! Never mind that people went to see BARBIE! They went for nostalgia, curiosity, and most of all Margot Robbie, and Ryan Gosling. But apparently, that was enough for Netflix to hand Gerwig the keys to a massive VFX-heavy fantasy franchise.
And not just ANY fantasy franchise. One of the most beloved works of Christian fiction ever written. So naturally, Hollywood decides the perfect person to adapt a story built around Christian theology is a director whose worldview is at odds with the very foundation of the books.
Certainly there’s a case for not taking Hollywood gossip at face value. The internets are, after all, a swamp of speculation, and the difference between a rumour and a fact is usually the difference between a paying subscriber’s guess and an actual body on the street. That said, the sheer weight of the whispers now piling up around this production is its own source. And, whatever the source of the original leaks, the trade press has joined the chorus, with Variety adding its own considerable voice to the din.
“Everyone is collateral damage.”
That’s how one top Netflix insider summarized another bloody Monday at the streamer, which saw Dan Lin ousted as the company’s head of film.
Following last week’s six per cent workforce reduction at Netflix – which claimed victims including chief content officer Bela Bajaria and Lin’s right-hand Doug Belgrad – consensus said it was a matter of time before co-CEO Ted Sarandos would show Lin the door.
It took a day.
That means, at the very least, one of the dire predictions whispered on X has come true. The immediate cause of the bloodletting was said to be a Zoom-mediated falling-out between Lin and Gerwig.
As for the money: Variety puts the picture at $250 million for just the first instalment of what is (or was) planned to be a seven-film ‘franchise’. Other estimates run higher.
I had expected a train wreck. I confess I did not expect the train to derail before leaving the station.
