The Chronicles of Narnia property was in different hands until the late 1990s, and now we have an idea of why it changed hands at that time.
Frank Marshall is a producer that is no stranger to children’s movies. His credits include E.T., Indiana Jones, Back to the Future and An American Tail to name only a few of the 84 films on his producer credits list to date.
“Nothing was impossible for Frank,” Bogdanovich says. “You’d say, ‘I need a couch.’ And the next thing I’d know, I’d have a couch. Of course, he took it from his parents’ living room.”
There was one problem, Marshall says, that he couldn’t solve: adapting C.S. Lewis’ fantasy series “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Kennedy/Marshall had the property at Paramount from 1993-99, but in the pre-CG age, they couldn’t create the imaginary worlds.
“The centaurs were going to be animatronics, but they didn’t really look great,” Marshall says. “And people were nervous about the story being too Christian-based. The option lapsed, and then the technology hit.”
There will be no letting go, Marshall insists, when it comes to “The B.F.G.,” the Roald Dahl children’s story about a big, friendly giant they’ve been trying to adapt since 1991. It’s one of many projects the producing team has in various states of development, a slate that also includes Wayne Kramer’s “Crossing Over” and the next “Bourne” movie.
So that’s an interesting bit of information: people were nervous about it being “too Christian.” We know now, however, that it being so Christian was nothing for them to be afraid of. To the tune of over $700 million for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and more than $400 million for Prince Caspian.
But what would it have been like to have had yet another Narnia series based in animatronics and puppets? I wonder why they believed it was prior to the age of CG, as Jurassic Park opened that up in 1993. I suppose, however, that as the 90s went on, 1995’s Toy Story and 1997’s Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition releases didn’t have good enough CG to make the Narnia books filmable material yet.
And then there’s the removal of Christianity from the story? The move of the start of the story from World War II England to Los Angeles, CA after an earthquake was only part of it. But there’s not much more known about what it might have been.
Makes you think though. Would Paramount, had they gotten the franchise instead of Fox, have still been apprehensive about the Christianity contained within the story?
Addendum: My pal Lord Figtree that I met at LionCon e-mailed to remind me of the 1968 edition of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It ran in ten 25-minute segments, shown only in England. Who knows what the content of this mini-series is? Is it any good? How faithful to the novel is it? We may never know!