Producer Mark Johnson won an Oscar for producing 1988’s Best Picture, Rain Man, but that’s nothing compared to how his Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe kicked Kong’s butt at the box office last winter. (Okay, he didn’t say that, but he should have!)
The result, Johnson told EW, is that ”we are frantically trying to get Caspian ready for next year. For the end of ’07.” And then what? ”And then, you know, we have a tentative lineup. The question is, How soon do we start them? Do we do them — this going to sound wrong — in a factory assembly line sort of thing, sort of the way the Harry Potters are done? And I don’t mean that in any critical sense.” Oh, of course not. He continued: ”The problem with The Chronicles — it’s both its strength and its problem — is that each book is so different from the other. And with the exception of Aslan, there’s no one character who repeats in all of them.”
