At the beginning of 2001, Perry Moore embarked on a quest. Moore, an executive with an untested movie company called Walden Media, dispatched an impassioned letter to the chief executive of C.S. Lewis Co., seeking movie rights to the “Chronicles of Narnia” fantasy novels.
He vowed that Walden would be able to turn “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” the first book published in the series, into a movie. Over the previous seven years, in a time before “The Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter” had shown the profit potential in family-friendly sorcery epics, every major studio in town had turned down the project, some even twice.
Almost five years later, Moore’s promise will be kept, thanks to an unlikely cast of collaborators, including a former Tasmanian sheep farmer, a media-shy billionaire disgusted with much of Hollywood’s cinematic fare, and Walt Disney.
The march of technological progress and the United States’s shifting social currents have played their roles in bringing this saga to a resolution. But fittingly for a book and series in which Christian themes of sacrifice and resurrection are more than mere subtext, less quantifiable factors also featured prominently.
“This was a three-way leap of faith, frankly,” Dick Cook, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, said.