Netflix has released the first trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, with a theatrical run planned months before its streaming debut. The trailer’s standout musical cue is Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” which fits Gerwig’s description of the film as a “rock opera.”
The film adapts C.S. Lewis’ novel and takes place 1,000 years before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, making it a prequel to the wider Chronicles of Narnia story. The trailer offers a glimpse of Lewis’ universe being created, as well as the wardrobe familiar from the book series.
Digory Kirke, played by David McKenna, and Polly Plummer, played by Beatrice Campbell, travel to worlds beyond their own with help from the “magician” Andrew Ketterley, played by Daniel Craig. The trailer depicts these “infinity worlds” as places filled with both light and dark magic.
Gerwig, who directed Barbie and Little Women, has said she wanted the film to feel like a large-scale musical. “Narnia is literally a world made out of music. It is a world sung to life by Aslan, and rock ’n’ roll to me felt like a world made out of music.” The trailer brings that idea to life with “Stairway to Heaven.”
In a statement about the film, Gerwig said she first read The Magician’s Nephew as a child and fell in love with the idea of “a cosmic lion singing the world of Narnia to life.” The idea of a universe built out of music stayed with her. She added that Lewis’ books led her to believe in magic, hidden worlds and adventure, and that “anywhere could be enchanted and that anyone could be swept up into an epic.”
This will be the first live-action film adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew. Other books in the seven-part Narnia series have been adapted multiple times, especially The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Live-action versions of Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader have also been released. The novel has previously been adapted for theater, radio and in comic form. Netflix acquired the rights to C.S. Lewis’ works in 2018.
The cast includes Emma Mackey, Carey Mulligan, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Daniel Craig, Ciarán Hinds, Denise Gough, Susan Wokoma and Meryl Streep, alongside newcomers David McKenna and Beatrice Campbell.
Netflix had expected the film to arrive in 2026, but delayed its release in May. Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew will open in IMAX theaters worldwide on February 12, 2027, with early IMAX showings starting February 10. It will begin streaming on Netflix on April 2, 2027, months after its theatrical debut.
