The young stars of the eagerly awaited Christmas blockbuster The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are already getting ready for further adventures in Narnia. William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Skandar Keynes and Georgie Henley – who play the siblings Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy in C.S. Lewis’s mammoth fantasy tale – are on stand-by to be in the film Prince Caspian, one of the seven books in Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series.
“We’ve got a script nearly ready, but The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has to come out and do well first before we get the green light,” Perry Moore, the film’s executive producer, told me.
Moore, who has written the lavish illustrated companion book about the making of the picture, added that Prince Caspian was the next logical choice because it features all four of the children.
“We want the kids back before they get too old to do it again,” he said of the young actors, who all live in Britain and were chosen during a two-year search in which 4,000 children were auditioned. “In Prince Caspian the story is set a year later and they’re called back to Narnia in another crisis,” said Moore, who works for Walden Media, the studio behind the movie.
Prince Caspian would, like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, shoot on location in New Zealand using the Weta Workshop special effects company where The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the forthcoming King Kong were filmed. It was Moore who spent several years pursuing the rights to the collection of seven books.