Greta Gerwig somehow gets Netflix to give her an IMAX release

Greta Gerwig must be the White Witch incarnate, because she just pulled off some real magic in support of her upcoming Narnia film. (It’s unclear if Turkish delight was involved, but it couldn’t have hurt.) On Thanksgiving Day next year, fans of Mr. Tumnus and Lucy Pevensie will be able to walk through a wardrobe—or Fandango, same difference—right into a giant IMAX stadium to watch whatever she cooks up. 

But wait—why wouldn’t the director of the highest grossing film of 2023 get a big screen theatrical run? It’s a question that shouldn’t even need to be asked. The answer, historically at least, is Netflix, which really hates to have its movies premiere anywhere else but the platform. They’ve done a few limited runs for Oscar hopefuls and films with major blockbuster potential like Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion, but even the latter only got a single week on the big screen before it transferred to tablets and home TVs. (Daniel Craig previously decried this choice, writing of the next Knives Out film, Wake Up Dead Man, “The people I speak to—the fans, I suppose—all they want to do is take their families and go see it at the cinemas. That’s all they want to do. Hopefully we can give them that experience.”)

Even though putting Gerwig’s next film in theaters is kind of a no-brainer, the director still had to undergo “months” of negotiations, per Variety. (The decision has been in the works since at least October, when we first reported on it.) As we saw with Oppenheimer, getting tickets to one of the country’s limited giant screens can sometimes be a bit of an undertaking, so you may want to purchase early. At least you’ll have two full weeks to see it this time, as opposed to Glass Onion‘s mere one; fingers crossed that this decision will be precedent-setting in that regard. If you miss out, you can attempt to recreate the experience by stepping into your wardrobe, closing your eyes, and opening them back up in your living room when the film hits the Netflix platform on Christmas Day 2026.