Chronicles of Narnia to be produced by Netflix

[rthstewart]

From EW and many other places

The streaming service is adapting the beloved fantasy franchise into new films based on the seven fantasy novels that launched in 1950 with C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Chronicles of Narnia is the tale of four British children during World War II who escape into an alternate magical world.

“It is wonderful to know that folks from all over are looking forward to seeing more of Narnia, and that the advances in production and distribution technology have made it possible for us to make Narnian adventures come to life all over the world,” said Douglas Gresham, stepson of C.S. Lewis, in a statement released by Netflix. “Netflix seems to be the very best medium with which to achieve this aim, and I am looking forward to working with them towards this goal.”

It’s not yet clear how many pieces of content will be produced and what form they will take. Producer Mark Gordon describes “multiple productions” and “both stellar feature-length and episodic programming.” Gordon added, “Narnia is one of those rare properties that spans multiple generations and geographies.” ....

One immediate concern of fans after the announcement was made was whether the Netflix versions would water down the books’ Christian themes — a frequent criticism of the titles distributed by Disney. “I do not trust Netflix to do justice for the series! They will be trying to take God out of it like other companies have [for other] Christian movies,” wrote one commenter...

So of course we've been yacking about it all day on Twitter.  Thoughts?  Fancasts?  Given Gresham's involvement, I'm assuming this is likely for younger audiences, family themed, and probably more Christian themed -- I guess Netflix does have a production line for that sort of content. 

You know what I want to see -- True Beasts, adults in children's bodies, humor, politics, espionage, multiculturalism,  and wild dryad tree sex.  I think Bible Study is the more likely outcome but who knows?  Someone on Tumblr pointed out that this likely means an influx to Tumblr fandom and AO3 of purity police, though maybe they'll stick to where most of them still remain on Narnia fansites and fanfic.net?  And it will probably skew young, too.  And even in fandoms that are definitely (cartoons, etc) adults still have room to play in the sandbox.  And new original content and visuals does spur creativity. 

Comments

[edenfalling]

Tumblr is already a cesspit of purity police, but at least AO3 is opposed to that kind of thing -- the site is explicitly set up to be a safe space for writers, not for readers, so I am pretty sure the admins will not look favorably on people who start trying to pull that kind of bullshit there.

[beatrice_otter]

I am a very committed Christian. I totally want a Narnia series with Christian themes. And I also really want all of the stuff you named, the sorts of things you put in your fic. I want a Christian-themed Narnia that is not Yay-For-England-And-1940s-Morals, but rather a rich and complex world with lots of worldbuilding that is a delight to the imagination and deals with darker or wilder or more adult or more diverse things with a more nuanced view than a 1940s white heterosexual upper-class Englishman was capable of.

I have absolutely ZERO confidence that Netflix will be able to do ANY of that.

And, oh God, the last thing we need is more purity police ...

[yalumesse]

I'm not sure whether to be thrilled or worried or weary. It could be good. I could love iy. I WANT to love it. But re-reading the books right now, I find the heavy biblical connections and the "gee golly gosh" simple mindedness of the kids just annoying. I'm noticing how they constantly defer to Peter because Oldest Male = only one who can ever think/decide/command, and Susan is always the reluctant naysayer, and I don't want to see that.

My wishlist is like yours, especially the adults-in-kid-bodies part. If there's no wild dryad sex I will boycott :P What I really want is to recapture the feeling of Georgia as Lucy walking into the snow for the first time, but I think loyalty to the first cast is going to make anything that follows reall very hard to love because nostalgia.

The likely fandom overload is part of why I feel weary just thinking about it. I think your friend is right, the purity police will be a quiet constant we'll hav to deal with and uuuuuuu do not want. But I really want to see good Narnia fic. The stuff I've bookmarked, there's very little of it I like enough to keep the bookmarks of . Partly that's because I was younger and less picky when I had my last Narnia kick but it would be really nice to get some new enthusiasm round here. (Maybe even more of, hmmm, Harold and Morgan? Susan going shooting with Peggy? Is there any hope of this? ;)

[pru]

I doubt I will watch it. I understand the urge to continually remake versions of classics (Anne of Green Gables comes to mind) but at some point I don't need it anymore.

[aurilly]

I really really want something that's NOT a faithful adaptation of the books, going in order. The world needs that as little as it needs yet another "Wizard of Oz" remake that only focuses on the first book instead of the crackily delightful other 13. I want something that fills in missing stuff. I want to see more imagined about Corin fighting the bear. More about the Golden Age. A whole episode expanding on different chapters in VotDT, where they embellish and extrapolate and give me more. Stuff like that. I want them to go totally off-script and make it their own thing.

The "Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" show was my absolute favorite as a child. That show did a really interesting thing where they didn't stick to one time period. Some episodes had a ~19 year-old Indy, and some had a ~10 year-old Indy. It was vaguely consecutive within the two time periods, but obviously the adventures and supporting cast were different. That was so interesting and might work here, making more of a tapestry show that blips back and forth between different books and casts. That way, you get to do Pevensie stuff, but also other things, too.

I say this as someone who, obviously, loves every single word of the books, and have a lifelong devotion to this canon. But I'm growing tired of slavish adaptations that manage to wildly miss the mark. I remember watching the first season or so of BBC Musketeers and feeling that, even though the plot had NOTHING to do with the book plot, the spirit of it was the most similar to the book than any of the many adaptations I've seen. And the TV show of The Magicians similarly plays fast and loose with book canon, and is a delightful thing of its own (though I actually hate those books, so that's a slightly different case; the show writers clearly hate them in the same way I do, and have fixed every single criticism I had of them).

These are all pipe dreams of course. What we'll actually get is a disappointing by-the-book boring adaptation of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.

[edenfalling]

Addendum: I think also that I'm in a somewhat tangential position to a lot of Narnia fandom, because A) the books are my canon and I ultimately don't care about audiovisual adaptations, because on a fundamental level, they're never going to be "real" for me, and B) I am intensely committed to being as faithful to canon as I possibly can while C) cheerfully subverting Lewis's Christianity, ethnocentrism, and misogyny as often and deeply as I can. So far as I've observed over the years, people who take position C tend not to take position B, and often wind up adopting one or another audiovisual adaptation that likewise tosses out of bunch of Lewis's more idiosyncratic and frustrating aspects. Which is completely fair! It's just not how I happen to personally resolve my great love for and many and varied arguments with Lewis and his work.

I am honestly not sure why I haven't run into the same kind of attacks you have, though perhaps it's because either I'm just not as widely appealing a writer or because that particular breed of asshole can somehow sense that "you are Doing Christianity Wrong, you horrible sinner!" is not a tactic that has any impact whatsoever on me -- because I've never been trying to do Christianity in any form in the first place. *hands* Or maybe it's just that I don't write Pevensie-centric romance? I wonder if that's the deciding factor...

Eh. Fandom is always weird, because people are weird. I think building a community of people who are open-minded and accepting and just not interacting with the purity police and their culture of censorship is probably the policy best calculated to keep the rest of us happy and healthy and inspired to write. :)

(And if they must start by adapting LWW yet again (*sigh*) maybe I'll finally get to see a dramatization of Edmund fighting his way through three ogres to smash Jadis's wand. I do wish the previous adaptations had kept that detail...)

[generalleia]

OH MY GOSH OH MY GOSH OH MY GOSH! YES YES YES!!!

GIVE ME MORE NARNIA! I loved the Disney versions, I loved the old BBC versions, I love fanfic all shapes and sizes and themes (everything you described and more).

What I won't tolerate is people trying to police others how they can enjoy their fandom. *eyeroll*

[psyche29]

I am...ambivalent, I suppose. My first thought was literally, "Oh, here we go."

In the current abhorrent climate, I am disinterested in seeing how it goes. I believe I will end up letting them get on with it, and then see what everyone else (for values where "everyone else" equals you, Rth, and those who love your writing the way I do) is saying before I decide to watch or not.