Friends, hell has frozen over. Pigs are flying. Netflix is putting a first-run, big-budget picture in theaters and respecting theatrical release windows. When you’ve got someone like Greta Gerwig making movies for you, you kind of have to bend to their wishes about how they want the movie seen. The film is Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, based on the C.S. Lewis novel The Magician’s Nephew. No “Narnia.” It’s the most user-friendly of the remaining unadapted Narnia books, given that it’s about a multiverse, and we can never have enough movies about multiverses, can we? Anyway, there was a fair amount of pomp and circumstance around the trailer drop, with honest-to-god countdown clocks on electronic billboards around the world, and now it’s here. It’s finally here!
Peep it:
In lieu of a synopsis — so many people have read the damn book, so it’s not like you really need one — here’s a meaty quote from Gerwig delivered to Netflix’s Tudum blog about her reasons for making a Narnia movie:
“’I was a child when I first read ‘The Magician’s Nephew,’ and I fell in love with the gorgeously improbable but completely brilliant concept of a cosmic lion singing the world of Narnia to life,’ says Gerwig. ‘I didn’t know that I would grow up to make films, but a universe built out of music is an idea that always lived in my heart. It is the honor of a lifetime to be asked to imagine it into being. Because of C. S. Lewis’s ‘The Chronicles of Narnia,’ I believed in magic and hidden worlds and adventure. I believed that anywhere could be enchanted and that anyone could be swept up into an epic. That wonder and awe was available to everyone, even ordinary people like me … It transformed me.'”
Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew hits theaters on February 10.