Properly speaking, The Magician’s Nephew is book 6 of C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and HarperCollins’s revisionist renumbering is just wrong (full rant to come). Still, from the start I was glad that writer-director Greta Gerwig chose to begin Netflix’s Narnia series with The Magician’s Nephew, and not another retelling of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—and now, with the bold first trailer available, it seems even more clearly the right move, certainly for the direction Gerwig wants to go.
On Tuesday morning in New York City, Gerwig presented the trailer and some behind-the-scenes materials to a crowd of journalists (myself included) and industry insiders at the Lincoln Square IMAX, and fielded questions posed by interviewer Stephen Colbert. (“Thank you for doing this,” Gerwig said. Colbert’s reply: “I don’t have a job right now.”)
Like Gerwig, Colbert expressed a longtime enthusiasm for the Narnia stories, though he acknowledged that it was Lewis’s apologetical writings, like Mere Christianity, that first attracted his attention. Gerwig, though, described the Narnia stories as the defining stories of her childhood—“I could not be who I am without these books,” she said—along with Little Women (which, of course, she adapted in 2019. “I’ve had the privilege of adapting the two big books of my life.” She also pointed to a childhood viewing of the 1988 BBC adaptation on television as her first experience of seeing a book she loved brought to the screen. Gerwig’s enthusiasm for the books ran through her comments; when Colbert (whose deeply nerdy love of the mythology of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is well known) briefly confused the characters of Lucy and Susan Pevensie, Gerwig gently corrected him.
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