Narnia: The Magician's Nephew trailer lands with a February 2027 IMAX release date

Netflix released the first Narnia: The Magician's Nephew trailer on October 13 and locked the dates: IMAX sneak previews on February 10, 2027, worldwide theatrical and IMAX release on February 12, and Netflix streaming on April 2. That eight-week window makes it the first wide theatrical release in Netflix's history — until now the streamer limited cinemas to awards-qualifying runs and event weekends like the KPop Demon Hunters sing-alongs.

The trailer's biggest flex is musical. Aslan, voiced by Meryl Streep, sings Narnia into existence over Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," and per TV Insider, this is the first time the band has ever licensed the song for a film. Zeppelin spent five decades refusing every music supervisor in Hollywood; Gerwig got them for a trailer about a Christian lion.

Led Zeppelin never licensed "Stairway to Heaven" to a single movie in 55 years. The first one is a Narnia film.

What Gerwig built

This is Gerwig's first film since Barbie, and she's adapting the one Narnia book Hollywood never touched: The Magician's Nephew, the 1955 prequel about the creation of Narnia, has never been filmed. David McKenna plays Digory and Beatrice Campbell plays Polly, with Emma Mackey, Carey Mulligan, Ciarán Hinds, Daniel Craig, and Streep's Aslan around them.

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The Barbie braintrust largely carried over. Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt return for the score, Seamus McGarvey shoots, and Amy Pascal and Mark Gordon produce, with the C.S. Lewis Estate's Douglas Gresham as executive producer. Gerwig is contracted for at least two Narnia films, and she's been open about why this material:

"That wonder and awe was available to everyone, even ordinary people like me."

— Greta Gerwig, on discovering Narnia as a child

The date that moved

The February slot is itself news. Netflix's original deal with IMAX, announced back in 2024, pointed at a two-week Thanksgiving 2026 run with streaming by Christmas — the date this film no longer occupies. Instead of fighting Zootopia-sized holiday competition, The Magician's Nephew now gets February largely to itself, a corridor where event-scale fantasy has had room to breathe, and the streaming date slides to April.

The casting conversation will travel with it either way. Streep voicing Aslan — a character C.S. Lewis wrote as unambiguously male and unambiguously Christ — drew protest from parts of the fandom the moment it was reported in 2025, and the trailer doubling down with a cosmic, constellation-form Aslan guarantees that argument runs all the way to February 12. Netflix, which needs this experiment to prove its theatrical model works, presumably considers the argument free marketing.

Previously we wrote: Joe Russo calls Tom Holland the last great movie star — and hasn't cast him in Avengers: Doomsday