Empire magazine published the first look at Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew on Thursday, a production still of Emma Mackey as Jadis walking Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer down a stair, and confirmation that Meryl Streep is voicing Aslan.
The film is the first screen version of C. S. Lewis’s 1955 origin book. IMAX sneak previews begin February 10, 2027. Theaters get February 12. Netflix gets April 2.
Netflix is handling U.S. theatrical distribution. Sony Pictures Entertainment has the rest of the world. Tudum dated the window Wednesday, then Empire spent Thursday on the lion and the witch. David McKenna, from Lord of the Flies, plays Digory. Beatrice Campbell, from The Phoenician Scheme, plays Polly. Daniel Craig is Uncle Andrew. Carey Mulligan is Digory’s mother, Mabel. Ciarán Hinds, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Denise Gough, and Susan Wokoma round out the billed company.
Lewis set the London side of The Magician’s Nephew around 1900. Gerwig moved it to the 1950s, an England still coming off the war, because she wanted the glam-rock generation in the room. “I wanted a rock opera. I wanted it to be big and transporting,” she told Empire. “Narnia is literally a world made out of music. It is a world sung to life by Aslan, and rock ’n’ roll to me felt like a world made out of music.” Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, who scored Barbie with her, are writing the music. Polygon said audiences should not expect a sung-through musical.
Gerwig told Empire she wanted a voice that carried depth and joy, someone older than 70 who still had a child’s capacity for wonder, “one of the greatest actors to ever do it.” That list, she said, is not a long one. Streep is voicing Aslan. The two already made Little Women together.
Empire’s cover is a mosaic lion with one blue eye and one orange. The magazine said the mismatched eyes and the red stripes nod to David Bowie, a Gerwig north star. The still on this page is the other first look: Mackey in sequins, the children behind her, light pouring through a ruined arch. Jadis is how Netflix chose to walk you in. The lion on the newsstand is the argument.
Gerwig, in the Tudum note, said she first read the book as a child and fell in love with “the gorgeously improbable but completely brilliant concept of a cosmic lion singing the world of Narnia to life.” Douglas Gresham and Melvin Adams executive produce for the C. S. Lewis Estate. The company called her vision moving and said it was excited for a new generation to have it.
The Walden pictures stopped in 2010. This is the first Narnia with a locked theatrical Friday in fifteen years, and the first Magician’s Nephew anyone has put on a screen. IMAX gets a two-day sneak. Then the multiplex. Then the app. Whether Lewis’s sung-into-being lion still sounds like Lewis when those rooms open in February is the question the still cannot answer.
Narnia: The Magician's Nephew is a title this desk is watching. Windows, studios, and the rest of the slate live on Upcoming.
