Greta Gerwig’s highly anticipated Chronicles of Narnia movie is being produced by Netflix and will receive a theatrical and streaming release next year. The first installment will not be a remake of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but rather an adaptation of the prequel novel, The Magician’s Nephew.
The film is currently filming in London, and pictures and videos have recently surfaced online of stunt performers filming a sequence on the streets of the city. Notably, one of the stunt performers is filling in for Emma Mackey, who Gerwig has cast to play the iconic White Witch in the film.
New looks at Netflix’s Narnia movie
See the video and a few additional photos, shared by trusted leaker UnBoxPHD, below:
— NarniaWeb (@NarniaWeb) August 23, 2025
Whereas the White Witch is the central antagonist in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, this story is set years prior to those events, and instead sees the character, whose real name is Jadis, in a very different position. Seen riding a horse through London here, these leaks promise a very different approach for Gerwig’s take on the Narnia series.
Alongside Mackey, it’s been reported that Meryl Streep is in talks to appear as Aslan, Daniel Craig is said to be in talks for an undisclosed role, and Carey Mulligan will play Mabel Kirke.
Earlier set leaks for the movie suggest a change to the timeline, seemingly taking place in the 1950s.
The first filming set for Netflix’s « The Chronicles of Narnia » adaptation was spotted yesterday in London.
— Narnia Netflix News ( N.N.N ) (@Leeyominn) August 11, 2025
From the details, the scene appears to be set in 1955.
The Magician’s Nephew, which will be the first film in the series, actually takes place in the early 1900s. pic.twitter.com/n2MCrIM8Tr
Narnia adaptation history
In the mid-2000s, it seemed as if The Chronicles of Narnia was poised to become the next big blockbuster fantasy series. Amidst the rip-roaring craze of the era, which had seen gargantuan multi-installment series such as The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter adapted into multi-billion dollar movie franchises of their own, the Walt Disney Company decided to try its hand at pulling such a feat.
The House of Mouse sought to accomplish this by purchasing the rights to C.S. Lewis’s iconic fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia. The book series had been in existence for several decades by this point, and was beloved by multiple generations of fans. Things got off to a swinging start, as Disney adapted the first-published novel of Lewis’ series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, to great critical and financial success.
However, the studio soon realized that adapting Lewis’s seven-book series would prove far more difficult than many of its fantasy adaptation contemporaries. For one, whereas The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter had consistent protagonists throughout their mainline stories, the Narnia books focused on different characters for nearly every entry, as Lewis grappled with the characters growing up and being unable to return to the whimsical land of Narnia, often in real time.
In addition to this, while the books were enormously popular overseas, American audiences were really only familiar with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. These concerns were further exacerbated when the film’s sequel, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, was released to far more middling financial and critical reception.
Disney would go on to make one more Narnia film, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a few years later, to ever lessening results, before tapping out altogether. But now, in an age in which other long-form fantasy projects such as Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and The Lord of the Rings are being unspooled into multiple interconnected projects, a new creative is taking another run at adapting Narnia into films.
The new movie is scheduled to be released in 2026.