Narnia’s New Movie Prequel Avoids The Biggest Issue With Film Prequels
Zoë Miskelly is an editor and second in command for Screen Rant's Movies team, having covered the entertainment industry for almost 10 years now. Zoë's love of superheroes and all things Marvel & DC started out in childhood, and has blossomed into a career getting to talk about some of the biggest and best movies and shows of all time, having previously focused on comics while working at WhatCulture.
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Narnia's upcoming movie prequel Narnia: The Magician's Nephew has already had several details revealed about it that help it avoid one of the most common pitfalls of prequel films made for already popular movie series, since it would be easy to simply follow the prior live-action movies closely in terms of things like visuals and tone.
Over the past years, prequel movies following up on major franchises have become an increasingly common aspect of the film world. Captain Marvel provided an MCU prequel origin story set well before almost every other movie in the series released before it, the Wicked movies serve as prequels to The Wizard Of Oz's story, and films like Cruella and the Minions series have rounded out this slate, ensuring audiences can see what happened before the start of some of their favorite film stories.
Narnia is continuing this trend with Narnia: The Magician's Nephew, which is due to be set long before the main events in the fantasy world that audiences saw on-screen years prior. This makes it the more interesting already, especially given how it sounds as though the film is taking a promising approach when it comes to the matter of how to handle being a prequel that follows up on a series with popular pre-existing films.
Narnia: The Magician's Nephew Already Is Set Up To Be Very Different To The Main Movies
Several years after the last film in the main live-action Narnia movies - which ran from 2005-2010, and ended with The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader - a new film that adapts the wider book series is on the horizon. As the name Narnia: The Magician's Nephew suggests, the upcoming fantasy movie is set to adapt The Magician's Nephew book, which serves as a prequel of sorts for the Narnia series, though it was released sixth out of the central seven novels.
The Magician's Nephew focuses on its two child protagonists learning about other worlds, revealing Narnia is just out of many other universes of sorts. Importantly, The Magician's Nephew also features the lion Aslan constructing Narnia, and explains how the magical wardrobe of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe fame comes to be, serving as an origin story that explains many crucial corners of the series and its lore.
While this means Narnia: The Magician's Nephew will also focus on some of the same characters and settings introduced in the original live-action series, director Greta Gerwig has already confirmed her intention to make the prequel movie very, very different to these films. This is both in that Meryl Streep has been cast as Aslan, and in that she describes her vision for the movie in an interview with Empire to be that of a "rock opera", which is certainly a very different sounding description to anything that would generally be used to describe the other Narnia movies.
Why Narnia: The Magician's Nephew Being Different To The Main Movies Is Good For The Origin Story Prequel
Though there is something to be said for mainline movies in some series having the same visuals and narrative tone, the wider Narnia series wouldn't seem to benefit from Narnia: The Magician's Nephew being exactly the same as its predecessors.
Ultimately, it makes a lot of sense to have the prequel feel different for a range of reasons. Much like the book, it seems the movie adaptation is due to be set decades before the Pevensie family travel to Narnia, meaning keeping things as clearly different as possible helps audiences to register that this story is set way before the one they're likely most familiar with.
Similarly, having the franchise take an over a decade break in this sense before having a release that feels exactly the same would arguably be something of a waste, and risks falling into some of the more commonly criticized territory prequel films that release later down the line often fall into in terms of not feeling like their own thing or being willing to take their own risks.
Given the directorial history of Greta Gerwig, taking a different approach and letting Narnia: The Magician's Nephew spread its own proverbial wings already sounds like the best movie for the film and wider Narnia series, as Barbie alone strongly supports the idea that Gerwig can take a pre-existing franchise and depict it in a striking way that still feels familiar.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.