Chronicles of Narnia reboot: The Silver Chair will launch new franchise based in CS Lewis's world
'It’s all going to be a brand new franchise'
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Your support makes all the difference.Various books from CS Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia series have been adapted to the screen in some form or another - from TV series to video games - the most successful of which was the three part series started in 2005 with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
That film was quickly followed by 2008’s Prince Caspian, then 2010’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the three films in total grossing over $1.5 billion at the international box office.
Even with such a successful front, Walden Media lost the rights to the series, deciding to scrap their anticipated sequel The Magician’s Nephew, leaving the series in a weird limbo.
Soon, the rights were acquired once more, and Life of Pi scribe David Magee hired to write the script for an adaptation of The Silver Chair.
In June last year, he sent out a Tweet from his private Twitter account giving an unofficial update on the first draft, saying it had finally been finished.
Now, producer Mark Gordon has confirmed Narnia is very much coming back to cinemas, but not as we’ve seen it before.
“We’re hoping to be able to make the movie very shortly,” he told Collider. “It’s all going to be a brand new franchise. All original. All original characters, different directors, and an entire new team that this is coming from.”
He went on to confirm that the “all original” characters do indeed exist within “the world of Narnia”. Presumably, as The Silver Chair focusses on Aslan’s search for Prince Caspian’s son, both the lion and the Prince will likely be recast.
Being rebooted within such a short time from the original series’ release has become somewhat of a Hollywood trend in recent years, with the likes of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four both being redone within a decade of the original series.
However, both those superhero flicks were unsuccessful at the box office, with Fantastic Four 2 having seemingly been scrapped while Sony is now working wth Marvel on a new incarnation of Spider-Man. Will a Narnia reboot work with the last films so fresh in people's memory?
The one major difference here is that - unlike with the two above - this can be a completely separate story, with fewer recurring characters. Here's to hoping it is better than Prince Caspian.
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