By If there was any movie series that should have been massive in this day and age it’s C.S. Lewis’ books based in Narnia. It’s got an established brand, it’s kid friendly and it’s just plain cool. Yet, two studios have had trouble getting it off the ground (Disney made the first two most recent films and Fox 2000 the third). All three films made money, but not enough to continue the seven movie franchise. Now Tristar is stepping in and looking to reboot the entire thing, but they’re starting with The Silver Chair.
This is kind of odd if reports of this being a reboot and not a continuation are true. The Silver Chair is the fourth book in the series and involves characters from the previous books, especially The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. What it appears to be is that while the story will continue on from the previous films the tone, writers, directors and actors will all be entirely different.
The screenplay is already being hammered out by Life Of Pi and Finding Neverland scribe David Mage, but otherwise not much news on the approach yet.
It will be very interesting to see if Tristar, under new direction to find literary IP that will travel well and make movies out of them, can succeed where both Disney and Fox 2000 failed. As I said, everything is built in for them to succeed, but it’s been surprisingly hard to do so.
