Posted by: @lentenlands

Thanks. I will say that Production Weekly hides its information behind a paywall because it gets it straight from the casting/crewing grids that are sent out by talent agencies. 

Sites like Production List are essentially just guessing or pulling their information from publicly available sources, but PW only takes information that's sent out..

That is really interesting.

Do you you subscribe to PW yourself or do you know someone who works in the industry? It's ok if you can't say, I'm just curious, and was wondering how much confidence we ought to place in the fact that they relisted it when they did.

On the one hand, I absolutely don't believe that Matthew Aldrich will be retaining a producer credit on this... Perhaps there's a remote chance they will give him a low-level writing credit for legal reasons, but I can't see him getting a producer credit when he is no longer on the project.

However it's the title listing charge that makes me feel there is some deliberate direction at play here.

If they still don't know what book it is then why not leave it as "Untitled Chronicles of Narnia Project" like before? And if they do know what book it is, then why not put "Magician's Nephew" in the title block? (i.e. to match the story description they wrote below it)

Changing it to just "Narnia" though feels prompted and deliberate.... And it's the second or third time I've seen ithe title rendered that way in semi-official contexts... I just don't know if it actually means anything 

Any light you can shed on why the listing is written as it is, would therefore be hugely appreciated.

Could it be possible that they're calling the movie Narnia because it's combining the stories of two books into one movie? 

Or could it be that they're doing The Magician's Nephew, but they're scared that title won't ring any bells for mainstream audiences so they're calling it Narnia so everyone will know what it's about? 

@col-klink It could just be they are using "Narnia" as the umbrella title for the overall production, given that they will be doing two movies (not necessarily as one story, just as one administrative production) - and maybe its simply the case that "Narnia" is shorter than "The Chronicles of Narnia" for that purpose.

However, I must admit that ever since i started seeing it, i can't now un-see it, and its kind of piqued my curiosity in a way that probably isn't fully justified.... for example, its crossed my mind that we've heard Greta Gerwig speak occasionally about she relates to the joy and wonder of Narnia as a world, but very little about how she relates to characters like Lucy or Polly.

Perhaps that's just her not wanting to give the game away, but perhaps it shows where her focus is - on "Narnia" itself.

Or more-than-likely i'm just reading wayyyyy too much into it.

I remember there was a time when the Walt Disney company seemed to want all their movie titles to be as succinct as possible. Up. Brave. Frozen. Tangled. The Muppets. The Lone Ranger. Winnie the Pooh. John Carter. (Why would anyone want to go a movie that was simply titled John Carter? That sounds so boring! ) This was probably something other movie studios were doing too though the only non-Disney example I can think of is Hugo. (The source material was entitled The Invention of Hugo Cabret.)

If Netflix's first movie really is just titled Narnia-which I'm guessing it probably isn't but let's pretend it is for a moment-it strikes me in that vein. The benefit of titles like the ones I mentioned are they're catchy and usually easy to remember. The downside is that those titles are incredibly generic, boring, often lazy and in worst case scenarios, barely even have anything to do with their movies' plots. (cf. Brave and Tangled.) If the title really is just Narnia, well, that's nice in that Narnia fans all know to go see it, but it doesn't tell them anything else about the story. And what are they going to call the sequels? Narnia 2? Narnia 3? 

But Production Weekly probably is just using shorthand, and the movie is going to be called something else. The reason I wrote this whole post about what's likely a nonissue is that we still know so little about this project and we do know is so intriguing. 

Posted by: @icarus

A couple of other oddities about this - they have listed Matthew Aldrich there (presumably because they took the info from IMDB where he is still credited)

They've also not listed Greta Gerwig's production company "NB/GG Pictures" who I would presume would be a credited company, as they were on Barbie and other projects she's done with her husband (Noah Baumbach, providing the "NB" part of the company name)

To be fair and correct my error here, I have realised that NB/GG Pictures is credited on the PW listing - it's just that they have been included off to the right hand side near where you've redacted some some of the details, rather than being aligned on the left with all the other company names - that does at least give me more confidence that they have additional knowledge (as this is not a detail currently listed on IMDB) however the inclusion of Matthew Aldrich still makes me highly suspicious 

@lentenlands - if you have access to this week's issue, did you spot if there had been any changes to the text?

While reading some of these posts, it struck me that the ending of MN (about Digory's later life) could be left off the main film, and added as an after-credits section, with brief scenes with no dialogue and either Digs or Polly narrating, or a 'voice of the storyteller' by someone else. 

Posted by: @fantasia

So, I've had a day to mull over this post. I'm personally leaning towards believing it, and here's why. 

1. There has been more than one actor/actress drop hints that MN is the story in the works the past few weeks. [ETA: Correction, Jason Isaacs. I thought I had seen another, but now I can't find it.] These people do NOT frequent Narnia websites and their information comes from behind-the-scenes sources.

You may be thinking of the actor who placed young Percy Jackson who made an Instagram post about reading The Magician's Nephew. He not only tagged NarniaWeb in the reel but used the hashtag #narniacast as well. It's plausible his agent heard about auditions and that was their way of trying to attract the attention of the casting director!

While the folks at Production Weekly may not visit NarniaWeb, several other mainstream outlets covered the story after we first posted about Isaacs's comments. So I lean towards that their page was updated mainly based on that news story.