I suppose we should just be happy that they are even thinking of making another Narnia movie.
”We are currently discussing with both Fox and the C.S. Lewis Estate whether we will make another Narnia film,” a rep for Walden Media tells EW. Although the rep stresses “nothing is official yet,” should a new Narnia film get the greenlight, the rep says “it will be Magician’s Nephew.”
While I'm not upset about this decision – The Magician's Nephew will give us a lot of Tilda Swinton, after all – I do think it sort of confirms that Walden and Fox just aren't interested in the challenge of making Narnia work.
I think it's just too easy to say that people only care about The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. No one outside of fantasy geeks gave a shit about The Lord of The Rings trilogy until Peter Jackson made them the films to see. To be sure, the Narnia films have their charms – Skandar Keynes and Georgie Henley as Edmund and Lucy, most specifically – but Walden simply didn't adapt the books in a way that opened them up the way Jackson did for LOTR. The failure of the film franchise is theirs, not the source material or the audience.
That said, there is an argument to be made that you really only need to make six of the seven books into movies – The Horse and His Boy is enjoyable, but inconsequential* – and there is no rule that the films need to be made in publication order (since the publication order is not the chronological order). But The Silver Chair is last of the first four book chronology that is a shame to miss, particularly since Will Poulter was a brilliant Eustace Scrubb.
But of course I can understand the rush in getting to The Magician's Nephew before Tilda Swinton just says to hell with it and moves on to bigger and better things.
*It's also really racist.
