Unless you’ve been living under a rock, Greta Gerwig’s Narnia adaptation series, beginning with The Magician’s Nephew in early 2027, is not off to a banner start. There was reportedly some strife between Gerwig and Netflix brass, but the biggest story has to be the intense backlash to what Gerwig seems prepared to change from the original 1955 novel.
Before there was a trailer, loud, angry internet folks made their displeasure heard with virtually everything. Even after the excellent trailer dropped, those same angry internet folks came back for seconds. Does that sound familiar? It unfortunately should.
It is exactly what happened to The Odyssey and Resident Evil. Both movies were ridiculed for creative choices before footage was even seen, and trailers didn’t do anything to change people’s minds. Yet, those movies are undeniable successes.
The Odyssey is the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever, and it’s poised to sweep the Oscars. Resident Evil is now the highest-rated video game adaptation on Rotten Tomatoes, and it has made almost $400 million at the box office on a $75 million budget.
Narnia fans didn’t learn from that. And they’ve taken it a step further, proving just how much their marbles have been completely lost.
Narnia fans are making utter fools of themselves
I consider myself a pretty big Narnia fan. I own all three DVDs and the boxed set of books. It’s one of my favorite series, one of the few I’ve read in entirety. I’m exceptionally excited about Greta Gerwig’s turn to adapt the series for multiple reasons.
For one thing, she’s batting a perfect 1.000 with her feature films. Barbie, Ladybird, and Little Women are all outstanding works. She’s one of the best working directors today, and she is an artist with a clever, distinct style. She’s a great writer, too. Narnia fans should be utterly thrilled that she signed on to adapt the series.
Second, she’s starting at the beginning with the underrated The Magician’s Nephew, which got skipped over last time and is something I just reread. There’s a real chance the world will finally get the entire series instead of three movies that skip around and end up leaving the series unfinished.
Yet, fans of Narnia, of which there didn’t seem to be that many until now (can you spell grifting?), have completely and utterly lost their minds. They’ve gone well above and beyond what the detractors of The Odyssey and Resident Evil did, and they were made to look foolish for that. That includes creating a literal petition asking Netflix to remove Gerwig from future movies.
There is a literal petition on Change.org with over 9,000 signatures on it. How ridiculous can this get? “The integrity of the Narnia series hinges on respecting Lewis’s original vision, a fact that seems alarmingly overlooked by Netflix with the current adaptation under director Greta Gerwig. Changes to the timeline and foundational elements threaten to unravel the series’s intrinsic meanings and authorial intent,” the synopsis reads.
No other series undergoes nonsense like this. Was there a petition to honor Homer’s original work? Did fans sign and demand that other directors of movies leave because they might have a different take than the original author? This is obscenely ridiculous.
“Lewis’s work is a classic, not just loved but revered by millions who draw spiritual and moral strength from its pages. This modern reinterpretation risks erasing the very essence that made Narnia a guiding light for so many,” the petition continues. “It is not merely a matter of preference but of preserving the deep-seated values that C.S. Lewis wove into his narratives. By refusing to attend, view, or otherwise support the new adaptations, we send a clear message to Netflix.”
Narnia isn’t the Bible. It’s not a sacred text. It is a series of fictional books that create totally fictional characters set in fictional worlds. It is no more special than any other book series. But to make this all even more hilariously silly, this isn’t the first or second time it’s been adapted. The BBC took a stab at it, and then there were those three aforementioned movies.
Newsflash: those adaptations also made substantial tweaks to the source material. They are not one-to-one copies. And as for the director, since there’s such concern about Gerwig not being an overt Christian, Andrew Adamson is not a publicly professed Christian, either. He specifically set the movies as more fantasy films than spiritual allegories.
Plus, his other works are the first two Shrek movies, which aren’t exactly Christian, either. It is astonishing how insecure fans of books can get when there’s an adaptation, but I have truly never seen anything like this. If it wasn’t for Gerwig, we wouldn’t get any versions of the books, beginning with The Magician’s Nephew, that got skipped over last time.
We should be lining up to thank her, not pulling ridiculous stunts like this.
