My opinion on this project moves like a pendulum swinging between optimism to pessimism. There are way too many red flags at the moment, but I won't write it off until we get a confirmation on Aslan(a)'s casting.

I voted extremely concerned, as I already was before we had heard any details about the movie. If the sort of things we've been hearing about Aslan and Digory (and a third child?) turn out for the worst, I feel very sorry for Douglas Gresham. As I understand, it was a lifetime dream of his to turn the Narnia stories into films, only now for something like this to happen at the end of his life. 

I'm not really concerned about the new casting info. I am really inclined to think Boy 1 and Boy 2 are listings for the same part, but they're just looking for options/have decided to change the ethnicity and therefore issued a new casting call. 

The other option I lean towards is some kind of framing device/narrator. Not sure how that would work, but it's my best guess if all three really are leads/important/main characters. I wonder if there could be a narrator who is a child sitting in his room reading or telling the Narnia stories, or relaying them as something passed down in the family (a child or grandchild of Susan or something?). I'd be ok with that. 

It's been a week since the Meryl Streep report was confirmed by Deadline and I'm still at Extremely Concerned. Before then, I would have been Cautiously Optimistic to maybe even Very Excited at times. (Perhaps I was naive, but nearly everything Greta Gerwig had said about Narnia sounded promising and hopeful.)

Logically, the main reason for my concern is the original report by Nexus Point News that stated Aslan would be female in the adaptation. Even though Deadline was unable to confirm whether or not that particular detail was true, they were able to confirm that Meryl Streep was in talks to play Aslan. So, in my opinion, the fact that Nexus Point News' original reporting was accurate on that main detail is a strong indicator that they were also reporting accurately about Aslan being changed to female.

Emotionally, I’m having a very hard time with this. More than anything, I just keep thinking about how many people will feel disregarded and hurt by this decision. Aslan is a character that has brought comfort to so many, in good times and in bad, and to deliberately change him in a way that would make him unrecognizable… I can't wrap my head around it. It's been days and I still tear up thinking about it; there's something about it that strikes me to my core. It's just so senseless.

I hope in a few months we'll look back on this and think "Wow, that was a really scary moment," but right now my faith in this production is completely shaken.

The ironic thing is I would have been fairly content to speculate about this third child casting call mystery because I try to keep an open mind where changes are concerned, but fundamentally changing Aslan is completely off-limits for me.

I agree with the point that we sort of have to take this movie as fan fiction. Netflix just isn't capable of making this project because they are never going to understand the moral issues in the books and will instead make up other issues that are not in the books. At the most, we will get some nice visuals, but Netflix just doesn't write good shows.

I'm still on "neutral / wait and see" — and in fact, for some reason that I'm not sure I understand myself, I'm actually feeling less apprehensive about this film as time goes on and we still get no further verified news about it.

I still don't want Aslan to be literally portrayed as female, but if they do go ahead and do that, well, so be it. I doubt I'll like the resulting film, and I doubt many other fans of Narnia will either. But Narnia is a well-known enough "product" that the majority of viewers will be aware of the change and will understand that it's not accurate to what Lewis was intending for the character (especially as just about everyone, whether or not they're religious, knows who Aslan stands for — it's not exactly a great secret), and they will make up their own minds. If it does happen, and the film bombs at least partly because of it, well, that'll be a lesson to future directors not to mess with the canonical material in deliberately provocative ways.

And as to whether Digory will be Anglo-Indian, or whether there really will be a third main child character added... again, we just don't know what they're planning. We've only got snippets and rumours and speculations to go on. The people at Netflix seem to be famously tight-lipped about revealing any details of their projects before release — obviously even when negative rumours have got the fans up in arms, as is the case at the moment — and as I've said, they really don't seem to be good at managing their PR. But that's their problem (Netflix's) and it looks like no amount of yammering at them will get them to change.

I just think all we can do is wait and see what happens. There's still a lot of time between now and November 2026. If the new Narnia movie turns out to be worth watching (maybe even quite brilliant in some unexpected ways), that'll be a lovely surprise. Or it turns out to be an absolute travesty... it won't be the end of the world, at least not for me.