Netflix dropped the first trailer for Greta Gerwig's Narnia: The Magician's Nephew on October 13, and nobody can accuse it of thinking small.
There's a reported $280 million budget and a real theatrical run, IMAX included, from a company that used to treat theaters like a waiting room. There's the director of Barbie, a cast stacked with Daniel Craig, Emma Mackey, Carey Mulligan and Meryl Streep, and a Led Zeppelin song Jimmy Page and Robert Plant almost never license.
Netflix didn't just throw in the kitchen sink. It threw in the wardrobe.
So what is everyone fighting about? The cat.
Specifically, Streep voicing Aslan. He sings Narnia into existence, rules it, dies for it and comes back. He is Lewis's picture of Christ, and Lewis never pretended otherwise.
The trailer didn't calm anybody down. Aslan looms over everything as an enormous cosmic outline while "Stairway to Heaven" plays underneath. In case the theology was too subtle.
For the bad news from behind the curtain, read Mark Cassidy's excellent rundown right here on CBM. Jeff Sneider's sources claim "everyone at Netflix thinks the movie is awful," a test screening drew A Wrinkle in Time comparisons, and reshoots followed.
It's all anonymous, and nobody involved has responded. Cassidy covered the boardroom. I want to talk about the lion's throat.
Here's what we know. Gerwig hasn't said Aslan is now female, and the trailer's maned lion roars without saying a word. Streep's defenders point out that women voice male characters all the time. Nancy Cartwright has been Bart Simpson for nearly forty years.
Notice, though, that Bart is ten.
Forget the culture war for a second. This is about plumbing. At puberty, testosterone grows the male larynx, lengthens and thickens the vocal folds and drops the voice roughly an octave.
The National Center for Voice and Speech puts the vibrating length of men's vocal folds about 60 percent longer than women's. Bart hasn't hit puberty. Aslan is a grown lion whose voice is supposed to shake the foundations of a world.
Netflix has already run this experiment. Blue Eye Samurai asked us to believe an entire country took Mizu for a man. Maya Erskine is terrific in the role, but the disguise was over the second Mizu opened her mouth. Nobody watching was fooled for a moment, because an actress can play a man's swagger a lot more easily than she can produce a man's voice.
Pitch is the easy part. In a 2016 Scientific Reports study, women dropped their pitch as much as 35 percent when asked to sound big.
Resonance is the problem. Men's vocal tracts run about 15 percent longer, pulling their formants, the frequencies that give a voice its size and weight, roughly 20 percent lower. You can fake a little of that, but you're fighting your own anatomy on every line.
There is no biological route from Meryl Streep to James Earl Jones, the man who made Mufasa the king of all movie lions. And technology won't close the gap. Pitch her down and you get Miranda Priestly with a chest cold.
Rebuild the formants digitally and you've hired Meryl Streep so a computer can turn her into somebody else. And Aslan doesn't just talk. He sings a world into existence.
So why her? Gerwig told Empire, via TheWrap, that she wanted someone over 70 with a child's sense of wonder and "one of the greatest actors to ever do it." Then she added, "That list is not a long one."
Really? Who wouldn't want Denzel Washington voicing Aslan? He's over 70, he's on anybody's list of the greatest actors alive, and he was baptized and licensed as a minister in 2024. He'd understand the assignment.
Anthony Hopkins is over 70. Ian McKellen has already played a wise old mentor who dies and comes back stronger, which is basically the Aslan audition tape. Morgan Freeman has played God twice.
That list isn't short. It's just mostly men.
Gerwig hasn’t said why she passed on them, but to borrow a line from Lewis’s old friend Tolkien and bend it slightly, not all those who wonder are lost. So let’s wonder.
Loyalty: Streep was Aunt March in Gerwig's Little Women.
Brand: Barbie made Gerwig a billion-dollar director with a female lens, and flipping the voice of God fits that brand like a pink glove.
Marketing: controversy is free advertising, though it's a risky bet when the 2005 film grossed around $745 million with plenty of help from church groups. Theology: Gerwig grew up Unitarian Universalist, a tradition not famous for insisting God is a "He."
She also says the lion's red facial stripe and mismatched eyes are a nod to David Bowie. Ziggy Stardust was a lot of things. A Christ figure was not usually one of them.
Here's the part that stings. Lewis saw this fight coming in 1948. In an essay later collected as "Priestesses in the Church?" he wrote, "Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman."
He was writing about ordaining women, not casting, and you're free to think he was wrong. But Lewis cared enough about the question to write it down, which is more than anybody at Netflix has done.
None of that makes Gerwig a cynic. "I would not be who I am without these books," she said at the trailer launch, according to the Associated Press. Lewis's family has vouched for her too, per The Christian Post, though they reportedly hadn't heard a second of audio.
She even nails what makes this book special. Lewis doesn't blow up a world. He has Aslan sing one into being, and Gerwig calls Narnia "literally a world made out of music."
Which makes the casting even stranger. She built a $280 million movie around a song, then cast the singer against the physics of the part.
The stakes are huge. Done right, Narnia is Netflix's answer to Harry Potter. Done wrong, it's one more expensive CGI kingdom full of characters audiences half remember.
What separates the two is Lewis's moral spine. Digory's mother is dying (that's Carey Mulligan), Aslan sends him for an apple, and Jadis tempts him to take one home and cure her instead. Obey Aslan or save his mom.
Barbie worked because Gerwig could wink at a plastic icon. You can't wink at Aslan. Narnia needs a director willing to believe, at least for two hours, that the lion means what he says.
Maybe Streep surprises everybody. But when your story's emotional center is a voice that has to sound like it made the stars, you cast the voice first and the statement second.
Get the lion right and the rest of Narnia follows. Get it wrong, and Netflix has spent $280 million on a very pretty wardrobe with nothing in the back.
So who would you rather hear as Aslan: Meryl Streep or Denzel Washington? Sound off below.