Walden Media has already taken plenty of liberties with the Narnia books – like turning Prince Caspian into a sort of Pokemon Braveheart and giving Aslan the voice of Rob Roy – but nothing can compare with what it did yesterday. In a bid to salvage its ever-diminishing franchise, Walden announced that it will leapfrog a couple of less interesting books. Instead of making films based on The Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy, the company is going to skip straight to the more accessible origin story of The Magician's Nephew.
The grief felt by Narnia fans is almost palpable. They only started watching the series because they knew that eventually they'd be treated to a film about a silver chair – and then another about a horse – and now Walden's gone and stiffed them. It was bad enough when the BBC got bored and wandered off halfway through adapting the books in 1990, but this? This is unforgivable. These people deserve their magical chair stories.
Actually, let's be fair to Walden. As the producers are starting to realise, the main problem with adapting the whole Narnia series is that most casual audiences only really care about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. After that, they start to lose interest. And by the time they get to the book about the monkey that plays a trick on a donkey, they couldn't really give a stuff. Perhaps by making The Magician's Nephew – essentially The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: How It All Began – Walden can breathe some life back into the series. Maybe even enough to go back and appease hardcore Narnia fans by making that horse-based Moses allegory they're all so desperate for.
This is such a good idea that other film franchises must be kicking themselves for not thinking of it first. Completing a full series of literary adaptations is all very well, but doing so quite often makes for some tedious films. Take Harry Potter, for example. While it was a huge commercial success, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets adds so little to the series as a whole that it could have been done away with altogether. As could last year's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One, which was essentially two and a half hours of a boy looking glum in a tent.
And although they're held in high esteem – partly due to the vertiginous drop in quality once they ran out – the James Bond movies based on Ian Fleming's novels weren't all masterpieces. Would anybody have minded if Cubby Broccoli had passed over The Man With the Golden Gun? And who's to say the Twilight Saga wouldn't be improved if nobody made a movie of the second book? Or the fourth book? Or all of them, for that matter?
Has Walden done the right thing? Are you mourning the lack of a film based on The Silver Chair? And are there any instalments of literary adaptations you wish had never been made? Your thoughts below please.
