Posted by: @impending-doom

I don’t think we’ll worry as much about additional battle scenes & filmmakers trying to match the serious tone of Tolkien with these upcoming adaptations. Of course, there’s new risks involved but maybe now Narnia will have a fighting chance to feel more distinctly Narnian. At least that's my hope.

I think a major risk is the possibility of unwelcomed ideology being injected into Narnia. For this reason, I'm neutral on the Greta Gerwig rumor. I haven't seen the films she's directed, but from the reviews I've read, the way she's handled religion and faith in Lady Bird and Little Women seems to be respectful.

But on the other hand, Lady Bird doesn't shy away from pretty objectionable content that would turn off a lot of people. And as already mentioned, her upcoming Barbie adaptation is rumored to be more "progressive."

So, it can go either way.

@impending-doom Gerwig will differentiate Narnia from other properties.

Netflix handled ‘Wednesday’ very well to reinvent The Addams Family. 

If my optimism for Netflix was rekindled by the Greta Gerwig rumour (given that she is a big-name prestige director with a serious awards pedigree) my enthusiasm was promptly brought right back down to Earth after watching the recent Netflix Witcher spin-off series "The Witcher: Blood Origin" over the Christmas period.

To say it was bad it would be an understatement. In fact, it pretty much embodied everything wrong with Netflix as a company over the last few years - the budget of the show had clearly been slashed during production, and the episode count cut from 6 episodes to 4. As a result the character development and plotting felt entirely rushed, and huge reshoots had clearly been imposed to try and salvage something from it, including a new framing device, and a narrator who only served to state the blindingly obvious. I assume some executive thought adding it in was the only way to make the plot comprehensible, but the entire thing was pretty much a catastrophe anyway, so I'm not sure it made the slightest bit of difference.

The acting was poor, the editing and direction all over the place, and the whole thing just looked incredibly cheap. It was as if Netflix's entire corporate Penny Pinching policy was on full display.

I was a big fan of The Witcher Season 1 and 2, but if this is anything to go by, the recent rumblings of behind-the-scenes discontent at the company which accompanied Henry Cavill's departure from the show probably have a lot of truth to them.

Overall I think "Blood Origin" probably represented my absolute worst nightmare for what a Narnia adaptation at Netflix might look like. A cheap looking, incomprehensible mess, made with zero care or attention, whose only purpose seemed to be to pad-out the franchise.