Get ready to set aside another lazy Sunday or two: Variety is reporting that TriStar is bringing C.S. Lewis’ Narnia back to theaters. The studio has announced that it’ll be handling financing and distribution on The Silver Chair, the movie version of Lewis’ fourth Narnia book, and the first film in The Mark Gordon Company’s previously announced creative reboot of the series.
TriStar is actually the third studio in a decade to be whisked away to Narnia, a magical land of Christian allegories, expensive effects work, and apparently disappointing box office returns. The series was most recently (if only partially) adapted to the screen via Walden Media’s lavish The Chronicles Of Narnia, with Disney distributing the first two Chronicles, The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, in the late 2000s, before backing out to let 20th Century Fox have a crack at The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader. That film—released in 2010—starred The Maze Runner’s Will Poulter as Lewis’ beautifully named Eustace Scrubb, who’s also one of the main characters in The Silver Chair.
Back in January, Mark Gordon told reporters that his Narnia films would be a “brand-new franchise,” with no creative overlap between Walden’s series and his own, produced in association with TriStar, Entertainment One, and The C.S. Lewis Company. That presumably means Poulter—who’s 23 now, in any case—probably won’t be returning to Lewis’ world of evil witches, enchanted princes, and (to quote Wikipedia) the “delightfully gloomy but stalwart Marsh-wiggle Puddleglum” for another go-around. So far, in fact, no cast or director has been announced for the fourth coming of the author’s magical Jesus lion, Aslan, to theaters at all, although Life Of Pi screenwriter David Magee—no stranger to big, metaphorical cats—is apparently working on the script.