Well this has certainly up-ended almost all of my preconceived expectations about the movie!

I'm 50/50 on whether this indicates a change in setting for the story as a whole, or whether it indicates the addition of a framing device within which the story is going to be presented.

The former is probably the simplest explanation, and we have seen quite a few little details which have been hinting at a time period change for a while, but i am also struck by the fact that Magician's Nephew was published in 1955, and therefore the 1950s isn't a completely alien concept to the book, or as arbitrary a change as it might first seem.

I could therefore perhaps imagine a framing device featuring CS Lewis himself, or an elder Digory if we are prepared to push the train crash in Last Battle back by a few years. That would though start to look like Greta Gerwig trying to repeat the same trick twice from Little Women, and I kind of thought she wouldn't want to do that, but who knows.

I'm out. I will not be spending money to see it in theaters. There are too many fundamental story changes moving the timeframe. We can start with Frank, Helen, Strawberry, and the Pevensies being evacuated from London due to World War 2. 

I'm not leaving the forum, but such a drastic structural change means it is no longer The Magician's Nephew.

When I described the various tidbits that indicated at least some of the movie taking place in the 1950s, the first thing my brother said was "are you sure she's not doing SC?" I then reiterated that yes, everything else we know about the production indicates MN, but who even knows anymore.  

That being said, I am intrigued as to the decision making process behind the scenes. What story is Greta Gerwig telling? Is it one I will like? No idea, but I'm eager to find out!

Posted by: @icarus

I'm 50/50 on whether this indicates a change in setting for the story as a whole, or whether it indicates the addition of a framing device within which the story is going to be presented.

The former is probably the simplest explanation, and we have seen quite a few little details which have been hinting at a time period change for a while

We have? I'm confused. What were they?  

I'm inclined to believe this is for a framing device (though why that framing device would involve a swimming pool is beyond me.  ) Maybe that's just because I want that to be the case. I wouldn't necessarily mind updating the English sections of LWW or the other books (it doesn't really impact the story much whether the Pevensies are staying with the professor because of air raids or for some other reason) but The Magician's Nephew spends so much time in England and places such emphasis on the time period that I feel like you can't change it without changing the whole feel of the piece. 

And, honestly, I'm not even sure what practical reason there would be for resetting the story in the 1950s. That's still too long ago to feel instantly relatable for modern kids but not long ago enough to feel exotic or romantic. Are 50s-style sets and costumes just cheaper or something?  

Posted by: @col-klink

We have? I'm confused. What were they?  

Well, probably about 3 or 4 little things that never got published on NarniaWeb, partly because (at the time) they didn't seem to fit the pattern, and partly because we couldn't fully verify them.

But it's definitely one of those situations where suddenly finding the critical piece to the jigsaw puzzle has now retrospectively shone new light on the clues that previously seemed unusual and difficult to decipher.

I would probably put a lot of the stuff about the mysterious half-indian "third child" role into that camp -A lot of the conversation around that detail was about whether that was realistic or plausible for 1900s Britain...  Well it's something that certainly becomes a lot more historically plausible with a 50 year time jump.

There was also another fragment of a clue that got shared exclusively with the Patron members on Discord.

I wouldn't necessarily worry about it too much, overall it just seems like one of those things where the clues have been there all along hiding in plain site.

Hopefully in the next few days we'll have a chance to revisit some of them with fresh eyes.

I can only echo pretty much everything @col-klink just said, since I was thinking the same things.

What exactly are these previous little hints we've apparently been getting that point to a time period change, as both @icarus and @dot have mentioned? They haven't been discussed publicly anywhere on NarniaWeb. This news item about the 1950s swimming pool scene is the first I've heard of it at all.

I wouldn't be too upset if it's simply being used as a framing device, but setting the whole of MN in such a different time period from the book would be bizarre. And I cannot imagine how a swimming pool full of 1950s schoolboys could fit into the plot in any way. But I guess we can only wait and see... 

Yikes this is looking less and less worth the wait by the minute.  Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I'm such a stickler for adhering to the time period and location from the books. 

Well, this is odd. I have a really hard time imagining actually changing the timeframe, especially when that also bumps the Pevensies up to about the 1980s. That would be such a strange choice that I can’t see any reason for and would change a lot of the cultural context of the stories. I think for now until we have more information I’m gonna have to be in the camp of either some narrative device with Lewis or a glimpse at Professor Kirke just barely pre-TLB for some reason (though that also hinges on pushing that story back a bit).

I’ve been wondering when we were gonna get another tidbit that would bring me back to the forum to start guessing with everybody again but I gotta say I wasn’t anticipating this one lol.

Posted by: @karisa

Well, this is odd. I have a really hard time imagining actually changing the timeframe, especially when that also bumps the Pevensies up to about the 1980s.

Gosh, I was a kid in the 1980s, so I could have been one of them... why did I never manage to find a portal to Narnia while nosing around in people's wardrobes in my early years??  

Seriously, yes, it is getting curiouser and curiouser, to quote a line from a much earlier British children's fantasy classic than the Chronicles. We've toyed before with the question of setting Narnia movies in the present day, but there doesn't seem to be any reason I can think of at all for moving The Magician's Nephew into post-WW2 Britain. It's far less picturesque than late Victorian Britain, especially with the effects of the Blitz and ongoing food rationing (which didn't end completely until 1953) and increasing fears of nuclear war and... now there's a point, if they want to draw some kind of parallel between the total destruction of Charn and the threat of annihilation in our world. Lewis of course hints at that in Aslan's speech at the start of the last chapter of MN. But I can't see how moving the this-world setting into the nuclear age actually enhances the story in any way.

Or even if it is a framing device, which, as I said, I'm more hoping... well, why the 1950s specifically, when the rest of the series takes place in the 1940s? And again, what does a bunch of 40 pre-to-early-teenage boys in a historic swimming pool in Manchester have to do with anything even remotely Narnia-related???  

Well, if this adaptation really IS going to stray so far from the original story that it's unrecognisable, at least that makes it less likely it'll go any further than this one movie. And I'll still have to see it at least once, just to find out for myself what on earth they're going to do with it.  

Posted by: @courtenay

We've toyed before with the question of setting Narnia movies in the present day, but there doesn't seem to be any reason I can think of at all for moving The Magician's Nephew into post-WW2 Britain. It's far less picturesque than late Victorian Britain, especially with the effects of the Blitz and ongoing food rationing (which didn't end completely until 1953) 

To be honest, if you were to ask me to describe 1950s post-war Britain in one line, it might be "a new world re-emerging from.the death of the old world"

That doesn't necessarily sound completely out-of-touch with a book which features the death of one world (Charn) and the creation of another (Narnia).

Not that I'm necessarily advocating for it, but it does seem like a reasonable explanation.

There is no part of The Magician’s Nephew that is set in the 1950’s. It is baffling why they would even consider changing the timeline.  I will save a few dollars by not spending them on a film that has no respect for the source material. But more importantly, there is too much damage done to the original concept of the book.  At first I thought that Greta Gerwig should be given a chance,  but I don’t want to support her in any way if she doesn’t have any respect for the original book or its author.  I don’t want to see the movie even once if it doesn’t follow the timeline of the book.

Posted by: @icarus

To be honest, if you were to ask me to describe 1950s post-war Britain in one line, it might be "a new world re-emerging from.the death of the old world"

That doesn't necessarily sound completely out-of-touch with a book which features the death of one world (Charm) and the creation of another (Narnia).

Good point. I still can't quite see how it would enhance the plot overall though, nor what the 40 boys and the swimming pool are going to add to it...

May I please ask again, though — what were the previous hints you and one or two others mentioned before, that this adaptation would be set in a different time period? I haven't seen or heard anything of the kind, here or anywhere else, until now. 

@Courtenay I've sent you a PM with some details. You'll probably be disappointed with how banal most of them are (hence why they never got reported on) but it's definitely the case that the revelations of the new evidence suddenly explained why we were seeing these weird incongruities in some of the details

@icarus Yes, I got the PM, thanks. Any particular reasons for communicating privately rather than letting everyone here know the details, as I'm sure other people are wondering too? None of the hints seemed to be of a sensitive or controversial nature. (I wouldn't have mentioned it publicly here if you hadn't — just wondering.)

Anyway, I find this very intriguing, because it does strengthen the impression that a substantial portion of the film — maybe all of the this-world scenes — will actually be set in the mid-1950s. It's got to the point where I'm (mostly) able to set aside my what-are-they-DOING-to-one-of-my-favourite-stories-ever revulsion and feel genuinely curious.

(And in an odd way, it's even softening my reaction to the unconfirmed-but-undenied Meryl Streep casting rumour. If the entire movie is going to be so far removed from the original story as to be unrecognisable anyway, then making Aslan female just feels like par for the course. I wish they wouldn't go on calling it "Narnia" when it's sounding less and less like anything C.S. Lewis actually wrote, but there it is.)

I was just thinking, I could understand this better if The Magician's Nephew had already been adapted several times for the screen and was one of the more familiar Narnia stories for that reason. I'm thinking again of the recent (2020) film adaptation of The Secret Garden, which I still haven't managed to see, but I'm aware that in that version, they changed the setting from the Edwardian period (the original book was written in 1910-11) to 1947. Very similar to moving The Magician's Nephew from 1900 to some time in the 1950s, then.

In the case of The Secret Garden, that's a story that is already very well known and has had something like six previous film and TV adaptations, plus stage versions. It's been done "by the book" enough times that I can quite understand why a present-day director would decide this familiar classic could stand being reimagined in a different setting. Putting it in 1947 means that the main character, a young British girl born in India, is caught in the turmoil of the end of the British Raj. I'm aware, too, that Martha and Dickon, originally from a working-class Yorkshire family in the book, are played in this version with a different ethnicity (maybe Indian themselves, I'm not sure — can someone who's seen the film help me out here? ). Even without having watched it, I can see all this playing into a theme that only comes up briefly in the original story but is very pertinent today — Mary, as a privileged child of white imperialists in India, has grown up extremely prejudiced against "blacks" (she makes some very racist remarks at one point in the book and is strongly rebuked by Martha, but that's as far as it goes). A variation of the story like this film would be a good opportunity to explore those issues, hopefully without detracting too far from the basic story.

But I can't for the life of me imagine how something similar could be done with The Magician's Nephew, which is one of the less well-known Chronicles of Narnia and hasn't yet been adapted for the screen at all. So what Greta Gerwig and Netflix are doing with it... is growing more and more baffling, but I really am intrigued, even if I'm never going to be able to accept it as a genuine adaptation of Narnia!!