I have been an insatiable devourer of books since I could hold them in my chubby baby hands. I bring a novel with me in my backpack and in my car and in my coat pockets, anywhere there is the possibility of a moment of reading time: at red lights, in museums, during classes, at holiday celebrations.
The first book I remember carrying around is “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.” I was seven years old. I simply couldn’t set it down.
For me, as for countless others, discovering C.S. Lewis’ Narnia was like discovering another world for-real-for-real. I was enthralled. I tore through the seven-book series again and again, till the pages of my church library’s copy were bespeckled with popsicle stains and the glue of the binding was fractured. My mom ordered the church a new copy, and I kept the well-loved one.
I’ve read “The Chronicles of Narnia” twenty-odd times. I had a Narnia birthday party, complete with an Aslan cake. My C.S. Lewis collection is dogeared and dripping with annotations. I traveled to Oxford this summer and spent a month studying Lewis in the city where he wrote his greatest works. My relationship to Narnia — and to Lewis — has been the most fulfilling literary relationship of my life and invaluable to my personal relationship with Christ.
It may be surprising, then, to tell you that I am over-the-moon excited about Greta Gerwig’s 2026 Narnia adaptation.
It’s shocking to me how controversial that statement is in some Christian circles, both in-person and online.
And I get it, I mean kind-of. People really care about Narnia. People are really particular about settings and costumes and casting, and they find something to criticize about every set photo that leaks online. People want to see it handled well. I’m hardly ambivalent myself.
But I’m tempted to think all this hand-wringing, not-my-Narnia pushback that’s existed since Gerwig was announced as the film’s director in 2023 can really be boiled-down to “Oh my goodness! She’s not a Christian!”
I think they’re missing the point.
Gerwig is, objectively, great. She’s written and solo-directed three films (“Lady Bird,” “Little Women,” “Barbie”), and all three were nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards — making her the only director ever to go three-for-three on Best Picture nods. “Barbie” was the first film solely directed by a woman to gross over a billion dollars. Everything she touches turns to cinema gold.
But her universally-recognized talent on previous projects isn’t the whole reason Christians should be excited about Gerwig’s Narnia adaptation.
Gerwig has proven herself a trustworthy adapter of pre-existing works. “Little Women” is beautiful, it’s a fresh take on a literary classic — and it’s faithful to Louisa May Alcott’s vision. Gerwig combed Alcott’s words to compile her “Little Women” script, seeking to be true not just to the actual words and characters of the novel, but to Alcott’s very heart.
“Almost everything from the movie is either directly verbatim from the novel or from something else Louisa May Alcott wrote — a letter or a journal or another book,” Gerwig wrote for Vanity Fair.
Gerwig desires to honor Lewis just as much as Alcott. A 2024 Time “Women of the Year” feature on Gerwig stated that she was “studying” Lewis’ works “closely” in preparation to explore the Narnian world. In the same interview, when asked about her goals for the film, Gerwig responded with a reference to an obscure Lewis essay on literary criticism. Her few interviews about Narnia — with Time, with BBC, at the Cannes Film Festival — are dotted with reverence for the “Chronicles,” Lewis and the weight of the task she’s taken on.
“As a writer and a thinker, C.S. Lewis is so rich, and he’s so erudite … it’s like you have a collaborator, and the collaborator is both C.S. Lewis and who I was when I was eight,” Gerwig said in an interview at Cannes in 2024.
“I would say the two big books of my childhood were Little Women and the Narnia books,” Gerwig told Time.
This story is clearly more than just lucrative IP to its director.
All of this may not be enough to convince discerning Christian viewers to rethink their despairing expectations of a secular filmmaker. I may just have to cede to the implacability of the offendable consumer. But let me venture just a few more thoughts.
Gerwig grew up Catholic, and though she is lapsed, her affection for Christianity and her biblical literacy permeates her work and interview content — from the forgiving nuns and purifying church sanctuary of “Lady Bird” to the longing for a knowable Creator in “Barbie” to her explanation of why Peter’s denial of Christ is so poignant in a Neuhouse Hollywood Q&A.
“I always have some religious story threaded underneath that people can pick up on or not pick up on … even if you don’t believe in the stories, they are very old stories, and they do speak really deeply to people and their psychologies and how they deal with life,” Gerwig said to The Washington Post while promoting “Lady Bird.”
Sounds like someone who takes seriously not just filmmaking, not just Narnia, not just C.S. Lewis, but also Lewis’ faith, even if it’s not her own.
One of the most beautiful tenets of the Christian faith is the “imago Dei,” the belief that human beings are uniquely designed in the image of a creator God and that they are distinct among creation in having their own ability to create. This quality is not reserved for believers. Our God’s beauty is everywhere, and all people have the ability to reflect it in a unique way — even unknowingly. To say that loving Jesus is a prerequisite for making good, beautiful and true art is to assume a moral high ground that is problematic and unthoughtful.
C.S. Lewis felt this strongly. A student of the classics and a lover of mythology, he saw beauty and truth in the most pagan expressions of worship and storytelling. All of which, Lewis believed, point directly to the Christ the myth-tellers longed for and did not know. Narnia is chock-full of Lewis’ recyclings of these old stories, which he appropriated to further point to Christ.
This is why Narnia is a land populated by fauns, dryads, naiads, river gods, centaurs, minotaurs and even a literal embodiment of the raucous Roman deity Bacchus, who leads a party with Aslan in “Prince Caspian.” They’re more than set dressing for a magical world. Lewis knew that these things loved and retold by people have the potential to carry unique beauty and truth about Christ, even when their tellers intended them for different purposes.
Greta Gerwig, decorated, thoughtful filmmaker, is as imprinted with the imago Dei as any Christian — and she is capable of making a better movie than most people on the planet. “The Chronicles of Narnia” is a story which Lewis wrote pointing to the truth of the Gospel and which Gerwig intends to tell well, for the world to see, with an unprecedented IMAX deal and the distribution power of Netflix behind her.
And that’s something to be excited for.
Well said! I am also very, very excited for Gerwig’s Narnia!