Greta Gerwig has finally given audiences a look at her version of Narnia. The first trailer for Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew premiered on October 13 at a special IMAX screening at AMC Lincoln Center in New York, where the director joined Stephen Colbert on stage to introduce it. After years of rumors, interviews and guesswork, the project now has real images, and it is clearly aiming high.
The biggest surprise might be the music. The trailer is set to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” a song the band almost never lets anyone use. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page reportedly gave their personal approval, and the choice says a lot: Gerwig isn’t going for a standard fantasy trailer with booming drums. She wants something sweeping, emotional and a little unexpected.
The story goes back to the very beginning of C.S. Lewis’s world. Published in 1955 as the sixth book in the series, The Magician’s Nephew is a prequel. Two children in London around 1900 come across a set of magic rings and are carried off to places that shouldn’t exist, eventually watching the great lion Aslan bring Narnia itself into being. The trailer leans into that huge scale with one simple, striking line: “Have you ever seen a world born?”
It’s a smart place to start. For most people, Narnia still means a wardrobe, a snowy forest and a lamppost glowing in the woods. This book explains where much of that came from, which lets Gerwig build the world from scratch instead of retelling a story audiences already know by heart. It also lets the film be about wonder first, with the battles and prophecies coming later.
A big-screen bet from a streaming giant
Just as important is how people will see it. Netflix, which has owned the rights to the Narnia books since 2018, is giving the film a wide theatrical release from February 12, and it won’t arrive on the streaming service until April 2. That’s an unusual route for the platform, and it largely comes from Gerwig herself. She reportedly told Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos that she only makes movies for the big screen.
The film was first expected in November, but Netflix pushed it into 2027 to allow for a proper worldwide theatrical rollout. With a reported budget of around $280 million, the studio is clearly treating it as an event, not something to stream at the weekend.
Gerwig wrote her first draft of the screenplay in 2020 and 2021, and the cast mixes fresh faces with very familiar ones. Newcomers David McKenna and Beatrice Campbell play the two young leads. Around them are Daniel Craig, Emma Mackey, Ciarán Hinds and Carey Mulligan, and Meryl Streep voices Aslan. In the trailer the lion appears only as an enormous outline across the cosmos. It roars, but it never speaks, which neatly keeps the most anticipated voice in the film under wraps for now.
Taken together, the first look suggests a director who wants Narnia to feel big again: bright, strange, a bit old-fashioned in the best way, and made for a dark auditorium full of people looking up at the same screen. February suddenly seems a lot closer.