The Narnia series has never been an unsuccessful one, at least as far as money is concerned. It’s just that neither of its sequels have done as well as The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.
After pouring more money into Prince Caspian and getting around half of what they’d made on Wardrobe, Disney halted production in a budgetary dispute over Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eventually Disney would leave the franchise all together, with 20th Century Fox picking up the bill. As is usual in franchises with child actors, work on The Magician’s Nephew was announced immediately, just in time for Walden Media’s licensing deal with C.S. Lewis’ estate to expire. That was two years ago.
A couple months ago, however, the Mark Gordon company and Lewis’ estate announced that they were partnering to continue the series, and now a screenwriter has been announced for The Silver Chair, a.k.a., the Narnia book that would be the weird one if not for The Last Battle having claimed beyond any doubt the label of weirdest Narnia book. David Magee, Oscar nominated screenwriter of Life of Pi and Finding Neverland is on the job:
I have always loved The Chronicles Of Narnia and I endlessly imagined myself finding my own passage into Narnia someday. All these years later, I’m getting to fulfill that wish just a little bit by writing the film adaptation of The Silver Chair and could not be more excited about it.
Magee has his work cut out for him, in my opinion. Even as a kid The Silver Chair was always the point in the series where I stopped in my numerous rereads, the first of two books that felt quite tonally different than what had come before. But I’ll admit that it probably lends itself better to a film adaptation than my favorite of the books, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is very nearly a series of short stories rather than a whole plot arc. It’s also got a lot less of the exoticized Calormanes than, say, A Horse and His Boy, and it’s even possible that the filmmakers are considering the final books in the series that contain the young versions of the main child characters before their actors age up completely, though in the case of Chair, the only human recurring character is Eustace.
There is as yet no production company attached to the project, so there’s still no guarantee that it’ll make it to the screen.
(via Deadline.)
