Posted by: @jasmine_tarkheena

Though I would be concern that if they start with MN and go in chronological order, they turn Narnia into an overarching narrative, which I don't think was CS Lewis's intentions.

I'd kind of completely disagree with that, if only because going in chronological order gives you much more emphasis on the discrete standalone nature of the stories.

The jump from MN to LWW, and then from LWW to HHB is absolutely huge, with very little continuity in characters, times, or settings.

By contrast, publication order gives you a much smoother, more flowing transition form LWW though to SC, and really emphasises the idea of common characters and locations between stories.

Therefore, if you really wanted to dissuade viewers from the notion that Narnia is one seamlessly flowing narrative, then you'd start them off with the rollercoaster ride of jumping from MN to LWW to HHB.

I'm going to admit right up front that as old as this thread is, I don't believe I ever posted in it. I also didn't read it closely, so what I'm about to say may have already been posted. 

For my part, I selfishly want MN first because it's never been done before, whereas we have three releases of LWW. But that's neither here nor there. 😉 

What I will say is that I've always wished that whoever took on the entire Narnian world, would consider coming at it from the practical standpoint of actors ages. Digory and Polly are the oldest. It would be so nice to have them be older than the Pevensies. At some point there's going to be some fudging with the ages in the book to make that work (like, I don't think they'll wait 15ish years to make HHB after LWW) but if they can at least have the actors in the right order, that could be pretty cool. 🙂 

Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

Digory Kirke as a boy and Digory Kirke about 40 years later, are basically two different people, and when LWW starts, there is no real connection between them. Professor Kirke is not referred to in LWW by his first name, for instance. And for children, especially, they sometimes can't believe that their "oldies" were children, once, themselves. 

I am close to accepting that MN will be the first film.
However I will be disappointed if there is not some sort of narration in the early part of the story (what I want of course is that we will meet the narrator in LWW, because he will be the Professor, aka Digory Kirke). It makes a lot of sense for an older male to speak the words of Lewis the narrator, and somewhere in it he will quietly start to use the first person (I) instead of the third (he). A good drama doesn't need narration of course, but this would be a justifiable ploy to make first-time people wonder, and old hands smile. The narration would drop out, and we would follow the children's adventures.
If MN carries on right to the end of the book, there must be a mid-credits scene where we see adult Kirke dealing with the apple tree that has fallen in the storm. Perhaps a carpenter comes to look at the wood, and suggests he could make a nice chair or cupboard out of it. Kirke says, "Enough for a wardrobe do you think?"

@fantasia Won't they have the actor who played Prof. Kirke in their LWW play him in LB, not the actor who plays Digory in MN?

Posted by: @fantasia

For my part, I selfishly want MN first because it's never been done before, whereas we have three releases of LWW. But that's neither here nor there. 😉

I completely agree with you there @fantasia.  As much as I prefer and advocate for the publication order as the best reading order (at least to read them the first time!).  I am however hoping that Greta Gerwig's first production will be MN, firstly because as you say - we have 3 versions of LWW readily available.  Secondly, I think starting with MN will help deal with an issue I think the Walden and BBC productions both struggled with (although the regarding the BBC production the budget and the special affects was probably also a driving issue to not continue the series) - that being, not having the familiar Pevensies featuring as much in the other stories.  I think it would however help to really strengthen the focus on Aslan and the world of Narnia itself, thus building the likelihood of the other stories that have never been produced for film or television actually being accomplished.

By the way, @coracle, I like your suggestion of a mid-credit scene of an adult Digory Kirke dealing with the apple tree after the storm - something of that nature would be a great lead in to a LWW film IMO.

Posted by: @col-klink

@fantasia Won't they have the actor who played Prof. Kirke in their LWW play him in LB, not the actor who plays Digory in MN?

Well, let me ask you this: in this day and age of AI, do they have to be different actors? 

@fantasia AI-generated actors creep me out so I'd prefer it. But, of course, the filmmakers aren't catering specifically to me. (I don't mean that to sound bitter. It's just a statement of fact.) 

@fantasia

In LB Kirke is only 9 years older than in LWW. Whoever plays him in LB needs to look convincingly similar.

The boy who plays Digory in MN needn't look much like him, just similar skin tone and eye colour.  

If the mid-credits cameo I've suggested is used, how about middle aged Digory being seen only from the back? The focus will be on the damaged tree and the workman. 

I hope AI won't enter Narnia!

@coracle: However I will be disappointed if there is not some sort of narration in the early part of the story(what I want of course is that we will meet the narrator in LWW, because he will be the Professor, aka Digory Kirke)

But the first person we see in MN is not Digory Kirke, himself. We see him, mainly through Polly's eyes, a fellow only child & like, herself, perhaps, with only their own resources to depend on. Not the eyes of the four Pevensie children with each other to depend on, taking refuge with the Professor as WW2 evacuees, in 1939, a World War more horrible than even the 1st World War, which only ended finally with the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as devastating as the "Deplorable Word" that the dictatorial Jadis used to claim victory over her sister, and what C.S.Lewis may well have been hinting at, in the last pages of MN.

We - and Polly - see a broken-hearted young boy, no more & no less. His father is in India, and his mother is dangerously ill. His mother's own closest kin are Aunty Letitia (Letty) and Uncle Andrew, a rather creepy sort of person, who rather fancies himself, to put it bluntly. And from what I have read of pre-War Great Britain, and also in Australia, perhaps Uncle Andrew, I think, is no more than a caricature of some pre-WW1 attitudes, shared by the likes of Jadis, when we meet her. " Ours is a high and lonely destiny" rings a bell, a very loud bell, when four Empires tumbled down at the end of WW1. 

It is still in Queen Victoria's time, so the story is set before 1/1/1901, the momentous day when the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed on what we call Federation Day. (The day when my great-grandparents married in Melbourne, originally Australia's capital, by the way). Queen Victoria, herself, passed away on the 22nd of January 1901, three weeks afterwards. Believe me, children in those Victorian times had far different lives to what children would have today. Despite the improvements in Queen Victoria's 19th century Great Britain, in medicine and human rights, someone in Digory Kirke's position had good reason to cry buckets. 

In many ways, the development of the friendship between those two children drives the story of MN, and it is lovely to find out in LB that it lasts their whole lives, even if they don't marry at all. It is only because we've already read the series that LWW's Professor Kirke turns out to be that young boy, and when he tells them they won't get back into Narnia again through the Wardrobe that we really need to know how it came to be made from that Apple Digory brought from Narnia to give to his mother. Yes, Professor Kirke was the narrator in the BBC audio plays, not only for LWW, but also for PC and VDT. 

@Colonel Klink: @fantasiaWon't they have the actor who played Prof. Kirke in their LWW play him in LB, not the actor who plays Digory in MN?

I think that is a given, when an adult of at least 40 years of age needs to play both. You'd have the same problem with who plays King Caspian in three of the other six books. 

@waggawerewolf27 So  do you think a narrator in MN should be a woman?  Or not to have a narrator at all?

Posted by: @coracle
However I will be disappointed if there is not some sort of narration in the early part of the story.

@icarus It does matter which Movie is made first because they will assume that most of the audience was either not born or has not seen the Walden LWW. Which ever movie they do first has to be the introduction of their storyline, not only because they are going to completely change the story to make it with the ideas of today, but they just have to assume that their audience knows nothing and they have to introduce all of the plots.

They don't even show Narnia until the end of MN. I just think about HP where the sixth book has a lot of flashbacks. We can't just rearrange all the footage and show it in a chronological order. Information is supposed to come out at a certain time for the sake of building a narrative and i really think you lose something real in LWW when you do MN first. LWW is the whole game or at least the event upon which the history of Narnia pivots. The Pevensie's entering Narnia and the death and resurrection of Aslan.

I really do think the feel of this movie is going to be so different than Walden because of how different movies are now, the celebration of death and suffering in movies that now happens, that the Walden movie won't really fit.

Posted by: @decarus

@icarus  Which ever movie they do first has to be the introduction of their storyline.....they just have to assume that their audience knows nothing and they have to introduce all of the plots.

Although I would have probably agreed with that notion a few years back, I think my mind has definitely changed on the matter more recently.

Take for example the recent "Rings of Power" TV Series. It is a production which has absolutely nothing to do with the Peter Jackson films, and yet the show absolutely requires you to be familiar with the Peter Jackson films in order to enjoy it. I can't imagine anyone who hasn't seen those films would be able to understand anything that's going on (and clearly anyone who has only read the books is going to get immensely frustrated by the discrepancies of the adaptation) and yet it still works as a perfectly serviceable piece of television because they can rely on the fact that the majority of the viewers will have already seen the Peter Jackson films and so don't need to have the context of those elements re-established.

Likewise the recent Dune TV series. I am pretty sure that Denis Villeneuve has nothing to do with it, and yet the TV series is perfectly able to rely on the fact that current audiences will now be familiar with the world of Dune, in order to get all of the things its alluding to and foreshadowing.

The same goes for the movie "Oz: The Great & Powerful" from a few years back which we were discussing in a thread the other day. Its a film which has absolutely no legal connection to the classic 1939 MGM film "The Wizard of Oz" but at the same time its a film which absolutely relies on the audience being familiar with all of the classic elements from that specific version. The same goes for almost all the other Oz adaptations over the years, such as 1985's Return to Oz. They are all able to trade off the fact that the general audience can be expected to have a very strong cultural familiarity with the Judy Garland film, regardless of whether they have even seen it.

Therefore, if it came down to it, I genuinely think that LWW belongs in the same category now of fully ingrained cultural touchstone for the majority of the western world, and therefore you can very easily do MN first and still present it as a prequel to something pre-existing, without having to alter the story at all.

@icarus Do you think they should just not adapt The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at all but just do the other books? I feel like that'd be weird. 

@icarus I think we are going to have to agree to disagree. I don't think that the Dune movies make any sense at all which i have not read and Rings of Power makes almost as little sense and i have read the books once and watched the movies more than once. When i have to watch a explanation video on youtube to understand a show or they have to have a featurette at the end to explain the motivation of the characters then the creators have failed.

I completely understand that i don't get how people could not know about Narnia, because i read it for the first time when i was like eight years old and that was many years ago, but i still think that most people i know would not know Narnia. They might know of Narnia and Aslan and that there are children, but no details. They may have seen LWW 20 years ago, one time, but that is all they know and that is like a dream of a memory at this point. That may be different in other parts of the world, but where i live, i don't see it.

I think they have to start over, but you do make a good point that both Dune and Rings of Power did pretend that you know the plot and just went with it. It didn't work, in my opinion, but they did do that.

You can't compare anything to the Wizard of Oz. The way that movie is thought of, it is considered one of the greatest and the first and has been made and hinted at in so many ways over my entire life that it just doesn't compare to the others, in my opinion.