Just as Barbie was getting great buzz, it was announced that Greta Gerwig would be helming an adaptation of The Chronicle of Narnia for Netflix. The streamer has been eyeing this epic adaptation to be one of their releases for Christmas in 2026. There has been talk that Gerwig would naturally be hoping for her new film to have a theatrical release. Perhaps it was when Barbie became the juggernaut hit of 2023 that influenced their decision, but Netflix is now giving Gerwig what she wished for. Sort of.

According to Deadline, Netflix is now set to release Gerwig’s Narnia adaptation in IMAX globally for Thanksgiving on November 26, 2026. However, the movie would be released in a limited two-week window before ultimately streaming on the platform on Christmas Day. This plan is similar to when Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery was given a short theater run before streaming on Christmas of 2022. Glass Onion would actually go on to outperform other theater releases in its limited screenings.

Actor Jason Issacs may have let it slip that the book that Gerwig is adapting will be The Magician’s Nephew, which is a prequel. Issacs would say, “I loved all the Narnia books as a kid. When Peter was told he wouldn’t be coming back, I understood something devastating about mortality. I picked this one because Greta Gerwig is about to make a film of it, which I can’t wait to see.“

Netflix acquired the rights to C.S. Lewis’ series of Narnia novels way back in 2018. There are seven novels in the series: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Horse and His Boy, The Magician’s Nephew, and The Last Battle. The first four books have received multiple television adaptations over the decades since they were published in the 1950s. Walden Media made two big screen adaptations with Disney. The first, Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, was an enormous hit in 2005, grossing over $745 million worldwide, but the 2008 sequel Prince Caspian, made significantly less, $419 million. So Walden Media had to go to Fox to get a third movie made, 2010’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. That one made about as much as Prince Caspian.

If Gerwig is indeed making The Magician’s Nephew, the description of the book’s story reads, “Narnia… a land frozen in eternal winter… a country waiting to be set free. On a daring quest to save a life, two friends are hurled into another world, where an evil sorceress seeks to enslave them. But then the lion Aslan’s song weaves itself into the fabric of a new land, a land that will be known as Narnia. And in Narnia, all things are possible.”

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