Movies

Gerwig’s Chronicles of Narnia Can’t Fall for the Trap That Ruined Its $3B Predecessor

Gerwig’s Chronicles of Narnia Can’t Fall for the Trap That Ruined Its $3B Predecessor
Image credit: Legion-Media, Prime Video

The classic saga proved that following the viral trend isn’t always for good.

Summary:

  • Greta Gerwig has been confirmed to make a huge step towards the folktale world as she’s about to direct a Netflix reboot for Chronicles of Narnia, though she still needs to consider one significant flaw that the previous grand franchise overlooked back then.
  • The franchise’s first installment The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was released in 2005 and was thrown into a fierce competition with other big movie series that had a very different narrative.
  • There are still no details about Greta Gerwig’s upcoming reboot, but she may be very likely to bring a more accurate adaptation to the screen once she’s aware of the mistake made by the previous movies.

Greta Gerwig is shifting from Barbie ’s life in plastic to Chronicles of Narnia’s cozy folk tales, and we’re here for it. While the upcoming remake that will be released on Netflix hasn’t had its production started yet, there’s not so much to say about how exactly the proclaimed director will highlight C.S. Lewis's famous fantasy story.

Given how accurately Gerwig grasps a totally different view angle for the already well-known narrative, we may get to see something unexpectedly new in the reboot that wasn’t featured the same way in the 2005 grand franchise. Despite all that, there’s one big mistake that the Disney ’s movie adaptations had — and though nobody really noticed it, Greta Gerwig definitely should.

The first movie of Chronicles of Narnia’s franchise, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was released back in 2005 and unwillingly got swept away by a huge stream full of other big franchises gaining their momentum, like Harry Potter ’s early films and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.

Gerwig’s Chronicles of Narnia Can’t Fall for the Trap That Ruined Its $3B Predecessor - image 1

It will be fair to say that the latter ones completely blew the audience away thanks to their compelling storylines crammed with epic battles and dynamic action.

Back in the 2000s, there was indeed a trend (or maybe it has never left anyway) of blatant copycatting when studios had to rush and come up with big updates for their upcoming projects so that the latter ones would eventually reach the same level of success that the movies of the same type had shown before.

Disney’s Chronicles of Narnia fell victim to this trend too by expanding the plot with some epic war sequences that were never featured in the original books. Quite the contrary, C.S. Lewis’s intention to make the story somewhat comfy and sounding like a real folktale was reached in the book series, but crashed in the movies, though nobody seemed to mind it back then.

What brings Chronicles of Narnia apart from Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings is that the former has in fact nothing to do with the battle as its primary narrative as the books clearly put their focus on different things.

If Greta Gerwig eventually opts to stick to the original overall idea and the very essence of the story, we’re very likely to have an even better adaptation than the one that grossed more than $1 billion back in the day.