Next Narnia Movie: Magician's Nephew

[ht: Siris]
Despite the lackluster performance of the movie adaptation of Voyage of the Dawn Treader at the domestic box office (abroad, it apparently did better than Prince Caspian) Walden Media has decided to move forward with another Narnia movie: The Magician's Nephew

Why do The Magician's Nephew next?

It's a creative decision in terms of what story we felt has the best opportunity to draw the largest audience. The box office has pretty closely followed the sales pattern of the books. Prince Caspian sells about half of the books of Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, and it did about half of the box office. Caspian sells about a third more books than Dawn Treader, and it did about a third more box office. That pattern continues to decline with Silver Chair being the weakest book in the series in terms of consumer demand.

We just think the origin tale of The Magician's Nephew is a great one, and it brings back the characters that have proven to be the most popular—a lot of Aslan and the White Witch. It explains the origin of the lamppost and the wardrobe. The order of these books is something that few people agree on anyway. While Silver Chair certainly continues Eustace's adventure, we never knew when Magician's Nephew would come in the sequence of films. We never assumed it would be last, and we never assumed it would be first.

Now personally, it seems to me that you could do a bang-up movie of Silver Chair, which is one of my favorites out of the series (I think I'd rank favorites as Last Battle, Horse and His Boy and Silver Chair in that order) but it'll certainly be interesting to see Walden take a shot at Magician's Nephew next. I wonder if they'll go for Horse and His Boy after that. It seems fraught with peril for a movie studio given modern racial sensitivities and the situation in the Middle East (Lewis does, after all, fairly explicitly set the Calormenes up as a pagan version of the Turks) but if done deftly it seems like it could be a very cinematic story. My advice: cast a hot young Bollywood actress and Aravis and push the cultural influences in your Calormen design further East.