Director Greta Gerwig’s brightly colored “Barbie” film – starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken – will be released in cinemas in mid-July. And according to US media reports, the sought-after Californian filmmaker already has another prestigious project: for Netflix, Gerwig (39, “Lady Bird”, “Little Women”) is to direct at least two feature films based on the fantasy novels “The Chronicles of Narnia”, as the magazine “New Yorker” reported on Monday.
In 2018, the streaming service acquired the film rights to the seven-volume saga by Irish writer C.S. Lewis secured. The novels about adventures in the magical world of Narnia that Lewis published between 1950 and 1956 have sold over 100 million copies worldwide. The British BBC showed three mini-series from 1988 to 1990, and the three parts “The King of Narnia”, “Prince Caspian of Narnia” and “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” ran in cinemas between 2005 and 2010. They grossed a total of over $1.5 billion. It’s about the adventures of four siblings in a parallel world with magical residents. In the kingdom of legends they encounter evil forces and the kind-hearted lion Aslan.
Gerwig used to make a career as an actress herself and then made headlines in 2018 with her directorial debut “Lady Bird”. She was only the fifth woman ever to be nominated for a director’s Oscar, but ultimately went away empty-handed. Gerwig was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the time, as he later did for the screenplay for Little Women (2020).
