Netflix’s Narnia Timeline Change Creates A Strange Sequel Problem
The Lion, The Witch, and Ziggy Stardust?
Netflix is betting big on its next project, an adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia books. Barbie writer/director Greta Gerwig has signed on to write and direct the first two movies, and the first chapter will have an unprecedentedly wide exclusive theatrical window, demonstrating the streamer’s new strategy for entering the theater landscape.
Any Greta Gerwig adaptation will change its source material one way or another, but this film franchise, simply titled Narnia, is taking that philosophy to new levels. First, this series is beginning with the prequel book, The Magician’s Nephew, which is kind of like remaking Star Wars and starting with The Phantom Menace. But that’s not the only change: a newly revealed decision won’t just affect this movie, but every movie that follows it.
Narnia’s Big Timeline Change
Empire Magazine recently released a first look at the first Narnia movie, Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, which is scheduled for a February 12, 2027 release. The sneak peek included a glimpse of Aslan, who’s voiced by Meryl Streep and who now sports two differently colored eyes and a Bowie-inspired red streak in their fur.
That’s a surprisingly modern inspiration for a book series mostly set around the 1940s (with The Magician’s Nephew being set decades earlier), but there’s an explanation: the timeline has been moved. Netflix Narnia movies won’t touch the wartime era, with The Magician’s Nephew now being set in the 1950s. So while Jadis the White Witch wreaks havoc in the streets of London with a horse-drawn carriage in the book, it’s more likely she’ll be clambering on top of a black cab in Gerwig’s vision.
How This Changes Future Narnia Movies
Greta Gerwig’s version of Narnia is influenced by movements from long after the books’ wartime setting.
Gerwig’s vision for future Narnia movies is apparently very influenced by ‘60s and ‘70s rock and punk, as evidenced by the Bowie-esque Aslan. “In taking The Magician’s Nephew out of the early 1900s setting of the novel, and into ‘50s Britain instead, young heroes Digory (David McKenna) and Polly (Beatrice Campbell) take on fresh resonance,” the article reads. “After all, the kids of grey, muted 1950s Britain became the vibrant, ceaselessly imaginative ‘70s rock heroes that illuminated Gerwig’s world.”
That time difference will probably be shown more literally in future Narnia movies. There’s a huge time gap between The Magician’s Nephew and the rest of the books, so when Gerwig makes the second movie — which should be The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe — it should be set a few decades after the 1950s. In other words, this timeline change sets the vast majority of the franchise right where Gerwig drew her inspiration from.
However, this approach has one big sticking point: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is very much a wartime novel. The Pevensie children find the wardrobe that leads them to Narnia during a game of hide-and-seek in the country estate of a man referred to only as The Professor, and they’re only at his house because of a real-life event known as Operation Pied Piper.
The Real History Behind Narnia
Operation Pied Piper moved children away from heavily-bombed cities.
Operation Pied Piper was a British wartime initiative that moved vulnerable populations like children and pregnant women out of urban centers targeted by air strikes and into the country, often unaccompanied and housed with strangers. This is why the Pevensies are forced to stay with the Professor, who is actually Professor Digory Kirke, the now-grown protagonist of The Magician’s Nephew.
This is a very era-specific phenomenon, so moving the entire story past the 1940s raises the question of how future movies will tell their stories. Without the evacuation, how will the Pevensies encounter the wardrobe? Will they be rewritten as distant relatives of Digory visiting for the summer, or will their entire origin story be changed?
Gerwig can make the mythical land of Narnia as glam-rock as she wants — it is a fantasy world, after all. But the story’s real-world aspects are a bit more set in stone. It’s hardly an insurmountable problem, but while we won’t see how she writes her way around it until the second movie arrives, perhaps the prequel will offer some clues.
