The first trailer for Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew is here, and Greta Gerwig’s Narnia begins in color and song. The footage travels from a London attic to the Wood Between the Worlds, a hushed forest of Technicolor pools where Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer test the magic rings, offers a first moving look at Emma Mackey’s glittering Jadis, and saves its biggest moment for the end, as Aslan bursts out of a swirling cosmic nebula into the form of a lion while Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” rises underneath.
The song carries a story of its own. Hours before the trailer debuted, Gerwig sat down with Stephen Colbert at the AMC Lincoln Square IMAX theater in New York and explained how she won over a band that has famously refused to license “Stairway to Heaven” for films. She met with Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, who understood the heart of the story and love C.S. Lewis themselves, and they said yes. Guests at the event were greeted by a pre-show playlist of David Bowie, the Rolling Stones and Todd Rundgren, an early taste of the rock and roll spirit running through her Narnia.
The film is the first screen adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s prequel, the sixth Narnia book published but the first in the story’s own timeline. Digory and Polly, experimenting with his Uncle Andrew’s magic rings, accidentally wake the exiled Queen Jadis in the dying world of Charn and then arrive in an empty void just in time to watch Aslan sing Narnia into existence. Netflix set the stage on Monday with the film’s first official poster, and TDN stepped into the Wood Between the Worlds with the film’s official stills last month.
Newcomers David McKenna and Beatrice Campbell lead the film as Digory and Polly, and their performances in the trailer already carry the story’s curiosity and mischief. Emma Mackey plays Jadis, the future White Witch, a performance she has described as “all chaos and bad plans.” Meryl Streep voices Aslan, first glimpsed on Empire’s September cover, with Daniel Craig as the would-be magician Uncle Andrew and Carey Mulligan as Digory’s mother, Mabel Kirke.
As TDN reported in the spring, the film opens in theaters worldwide on Friday, February 12, 2027, with IMAX previews starting February 10, the widest theatrical rollout in Netflix’s history. It then arrives on Netflix on April 2, after a seven-week theatrical window.
That puts Gerwig in rare company. As TheWrap recounts, the band’s refusals are Hollywood legend: Cameron Crowe wrote and filmed an Almost Famous scene built around the song and cut it entirely when the band said no. The Simpsons wanted it for the Season 7 episode Bart Sells His Soul and settled for Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida when the band asked too much. Wayne’s World spent 30 years with its famous Stairway gag trimmed down to two notes before the real chords were restored for the 2022 4K release. Gerwig got the yes.
Deadline‘s account of Gerwig’s Colbert conversation adds a few details worth having. She screened the film for Robert Plant and Jimmy Page herself, and she explained the choice in terms of the story: the song is, in her words, “exactly the story” of the film, an epic about a spiritual journey and the true path set against false idols and wrong roads, which is why it was the song to introduce her Narnia to the world. Deadline also adds a recent name to the long list of productions the band has turned down: the Stranger Things finale sought ‘Stairway to Heaven’ last year and did not get it.