If you expected director Greta Gerwig to go basic for her upcoming Narnia movie, think again. The Magician’s Nephew, an adaptation of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia prequel book, is coming to theaters and Netflix next year, and in Gerwig’s first interview about it, she revealed her inspiration for the film came from a very unexpected place: British rock and roll.
“I wanted a rock opera,” Gerwig told Empire. “I wanted it to be big and transporting.” And while the film is not a musical, everything about it was born out of the transformative, influential vibes that came from British rock of the 1960s and 1970s.
“David Bowie saved my life,” Gerwig said. “Paul McCartney saved my life. David Gilmour saved my life. Pete Townshend saved my life. Jimmy Page, Robert Plant… When I heard their music, I had this deep sense of [thinking], ‘You’re gonna be okay.’ Narnia is literally a world made out of music. It is a world sung to life by Aslan, and rock ’n’ roll to me felt like a world made out of music.”
That inspiration might not make sense if Gerwig went literal with the adaptation. Lewis’s book is set in the early 1900s, well before rock and roll was a thing. Gerwig’s version, however, is set around when the book itself was published: the mid-1950s. The era when rockstars like Bowie, McCarthy, Page and Plant were growing up.
“They had this relationship to pain and loss and something as unpromising as a bomb site, and they made a castle,” Gerwig said of kids of that era. “They made a universe. They made something you could live inside of. I don’t know how you went from David Jones to David Bowie unless you went to Narnia and you saw something.”
David Jones was David Bowie’s birth name, by the way. And the idea that a trip to a world as magical as Narnia inspired that creativity is such an interesting place to begin a fantasy film.
Empire has the exclusive first look at The Magician’s Nephew in the form of a few magazine covers which you can see below. And, surely, in the coming days, they’ll have much more from Gerwig and her team. But for now, we’ll just let these quotes marinate and create our own fantasy of what this movie can be.
The Magician’s Nephew will be released in theaters on February 12, 2027, before debuting on Netflix on April 2, 2027. Here are those new images:
Empire’s exclusive subscriber cover for Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew is an epic sneak-peek at Aslan literally creating Narnia itself, courtesy of one of the film’s concept artist Jaime Jones.
Read more: https://t.co/scgVs5Im6A pic.twitter.com/OubVm7mjrc
— Empire (@empiremagazine) September 17, 2026
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