Now, to keep the party going, Netflix has a second big name fantasy title on the way. In addition to their series based on The Witcher, they’ve announced that they are developing new series and films based on author C.S. Lewis‘s “The Chronicles of Narnia” books.
Sony’s TriStar Pictures will be help bring The Silver Chair, the next installment in The Chronicles of Narnia film franchise, to the big screen, along with The Mark Gordon Company, The C.S. Lewis Company, and Entertainment One (eOne).
It was revealed back in January that The Mark Gordon Company and The C.S. Lewis Company were jointly developing The Silver Chair, which will reboot the film franchise and bring on a entirely new creative team.
The Chronicles of Narnia movie franchise has traveled a rough road, being dumped and picked up by different movie studios a couple of times, but it’s not dead just yet.
It was back in 2013 when we found out that a fourth movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair, was officially on the way. The movie would be a co-production of The Mark Gordon Company and C.S. Lewis Company, with C.S. Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham developing the screenplay along with Mark Gordon and C.S. Lewis Company director Vincent Sieber. Now Gordon has offered an update on the next movie in the franchise, saying that not only is it still alive and well but that it will be a reboot of the franchise entirely.
The Chronicles of Narnia movies, which are based on the books of author C.S. Lewis, never quite seemed to pop as a franchise like The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, for example. The movies did well enough at the box office—the first and best movie, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, doing a massive $745 million worldwide, and its sequels, Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader scoring $419 million and $415 million, around double their budgets—but the latter two were not well-met critically and didn’t make much of an impact.
After Fox took over the franchise from Disney for the third movie and things didn’t go any better than the second, it felt like that might have been the last of the Chronicles of Narnia we would see. Not so fast. It’s being reported that a fourth movie in the franchise is indeed on the way, based on the book The Silver Chair.
Students of the Unusual™ comic cover used with permission of 3BoysProductions
The Mercuri Bros.™ comic cover used with permission of Prodigal Son Press