How can The Silver Chair be a reboot? It's a direct sequel to a direct sequel to a direct sequel. If they were going for a reboot, they should have just used The Magician's Nephew.
edited 12th Jan '16 3:23:50 PM by LordVatek
This song needs more love.If they get to The Last Battle I wonder if and how they'll tweak the infamous Esoteric Happy Ending.
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If Silver Chair is okay Last Battle is pretty within reach. They could just skip Horse And His Boy and Magician'sNephew.
The Last Battle is definitely too esoteric to roll with. The entire story only makes sense as a kid-friendly Book of Revelations or Left Behind sort of thing. The other Narnia books were graciously much more subtle about their religious allegories.
In the Silver Chair, the only thing close to being anvilicious is when The Lady makes obvious straw atheist arguments to try to disprove the existence of anything outside of her realm.
The Horse and His Boy is one of the best in the entire Narnia Chronicles. Skipping that would be daft. And also counterproductive since it's about a horse. Girls as a group tend to like movies about horses. Just go back and look at the audience figures for the Black Stallion movie if ya don't believe me.
Given the track record of the previous films I just don't see Silver Chair doing well enough for the studio to agree to 3 more movies, and if they even do get a sequel they might as well jump to the end.
'Course the film could turn out amazing and they do all the remaining books and remake the previous three with the new "rebooted" style.
The Horse and His Boy is a great book, but it being a side-story crimps its adaptability. Which is a shame for its chances, but Lewis never intended his books to go onscreen. He just wrote about whatever he wanted. Only four of the Narnia books are direct followups, unlike the films of our time that have established serialized storytelling, like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and the MCU.
Horse and his Boy, I could see being made if the Narnia movies were way more successful than they are - not saying they're bad, but I'm talking Harry Potter levels of successful. It's a side story in the way that the upcoming Fantastic Beasts is and the appearance of the adult Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe characters is more or less a cameo.
Magician's Nephew, likewise but somewhat more likely, given it's a prequel and ties directly to the first movie.
Last Battle, don't have anything to add other than what bugs me the most is not the Revelations parallels but the whole deal with Susan's arbitrary Heel-Face-I don't believe in faeries-turn. :P
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Because that gets into a whole host of other issues with adaptations changing major plot points of books, etc. :P
Maybe I could get behind it if they gave it the Adaptation Expansion treatment, writing scenes from the Pevensie kids' perspective that showed the character development.
Edit to add: relevant essay
(and also references a short story by Neil Gaiman which goes into it).
edited 19th Jan '16 7:42:17 PM by Elle
I mean, the ending sucked, quite frankly. Changing it would be a goddamn blessing, consequences be damned. If Peter Jackson could remove the Scouring of the Shire, then someone else can remove Susan not going to Narnia (or hell, remove a good deal of the bullshit that made it esoteric in the first place).
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?I think the intention was that Lewis wanted to show that even the devout can fall away from God to the world. The Last Battle has tons of allegories for different types of believers and non-believers: the dwarves who refuse to believe they're in heaven, the Calormen leader who summons Tash without actually believing in him, the Calormen who's accepted into heaven by doing good in the name of Tash instead of Aslan, the ape as the false prophet, etc. And Lewis even claimed in a letter that perhaps one day Susan might find her way back to Narnia.
But the reason why it comes off as contrived and sorta sexist is because Susan's fall happens entirely offscreen. The only reason we're ever given is some exposition about her trying to act more adult and getting really into "lipsticks and nylons". So it's really anticlimactic and lets readers' own views run wild.
edited 19th Jan '16 7:53:15 PM by Tuckerscreator

Apparently due to start its production phase shortly
, though for some reason the word "reboot" has been thrown into the mix as well:
I can't imagine what they intend to achieve with this. It has been a few years since the last one and it is a different set of producers working on it now, but still. "Original characters"?