Disney’s new feature film, “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” spends a good deal more time than C.S. Lewis’s beloved children’s book on the climactic battle between the forces of the sinister White Witch and the army of Aslan, the supernatural lion. The movie of course has the benefit of studio bean counters and recognizes that this could be the mother of all screen battles – not just your basic struggle of good and evil but a $200 million smackdown between the religious right and godless Hollywood, between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and, for that matter, between Aslan and King Kong, a resurrected version of whom opens in a movie of his own a few days after “Narnia” does next month. The great philosophical debate of my childhood was: Who is stronger, King Kong or Mighty Joe Young? In the Kong-Aslan matchup, Aslan, a Christ figure, would seem to have the advantage of omnipotence, but that’s not to say he will prevail at the box office.
There are seven Narnia books in all, making them potentially the third great onslaught – after the movie adaptations of “Harry Potter” and Tolkien’s famous “Lord of the Rings” trilogy – of British children’s lit into the multiplex. Like the Rowling and Tolkien books, Lewis’s evoke a richly imagined parallel universe, but they differ in including a frankly religious element: not just an undercurrent of all-purpose, feel-good religiosity but a rigorous substratum of no-nonsense, orthodox Christianity. If you read between the lines – and sometimes right there in them – these stories are all about death and resurrection, salvation and damnation. From a moviemaking point of view, this is excellent news if you are hoping to reach the crowd that packed the theaters to see Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ,” probably not so great if you’re also hoping to lure all those wizards-and-weapons fans who made the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy such a hit (Disney is still kicking itself for passing on that one) and sheer disaster, presumably, if your target audience also includes the hordes of moviegoing teenagers that turned Disney’s last mega-hit, “Pirates of the Caribbean,” into an apparently inexhaustible asset.
In fact, there are some Hollywood observers who seem to believe that there is a good reason Lewis is among the last of the classic children’s authors to be adapted for the movies, and that in taking on Narnia, Disney has backed itself into a corner. If the studio plays down the Christian aspect of the story, it risks criticism from the religious right, the argument goes; if it is too upfront about the religious references, on the other hand, that could be toxic at the box office. Disney, which is producing “Narnia” with Walden Media, the “family friendly” entertainment company owned by the politically conservative financier Philip Anschutz, is hedging its bets and has, for example, already issued two separate soundtrack albums, one featuring Christian music and musicians and another with pop and rock tunes.