Robert Plant and Jimmy Page routinely turn down requests to use “Stairway to Heaven” onscreen — even when Cameron Crowe asked for Almost Famous — but they finally gave in to writer-director Greta Gerwig, allowing her to use it to score the just-released
first trailer for Netflix’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. At a Manhattan premiere for the trailer Tuesday morning, Gerwig told interviewer Stephen Colbert that it helped that Plant and Page are fans of C.S. Lewis and his Chronicles of Narnia saga. “I talked to them about a lot of the themes of the film,” Gerwig said. “They saw the heart and the story and the drama in it.”
Gerwig explained that the classic-rock warhorse matches her vision of the film, which adapts Lewis’ origin story for Narnia. “It’s an epic song,” she said. “It’s about the two paths of good and evil… It is a spiritual quest and a spiritual journey. So to me, this was a song that made sense to introduce the film to the world.”
In the interview, Gerwig revealed that she began work on the earliest drafts for The Magician’s Nephew in 2020, well before she established herself as a director of blockbusters with Barbie. The vast scope of the trailer — which stars Daniel Craig as the titular magician — makes it clear that her Narnia movie is another leap forward in scale as a director. Zeppelin aside, the trailer suggests a relatively faithful adaptation of the book, in which two children from Edwardian England stumble into the Wood Between Worlds, a realm filled with dimensional portals, and end up present for the birth of Narnia.
Young actors David McKenna and Beatrice Campbell play the leads, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer; Emma Mackey plays Jadis, the queen destined to become the White Witch; Carey Mulligan plays Digory’s mother; and Meryl Streep voices the lion deity Aslan, who summons Narnia into existence via song. As with Barbie, Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt are scoring the film.
The Magician’s Nephew was the sixth Narnia book Lewis published, though he later suggested that readers should start with it. Gerwig revealed that she approached Netflix with the idea of starting a cinematic version there as well.
In a first for a Netflix film, The Magician’s Nephew will have a five-week theatrical run, beginning Feb. 12, 2027, before reaching Netflix on April 2. It will be the streamer’s first wide theatrical release.
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