Narnia: The Magician's Nephew: Everything We Know Before Greta Gerwig's Rock-Opera Narnia Hits Theaters Feb. 12, 2027

The first thing you hear is a lone guitar picking out the opening chords of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." The first thing you see, as the A.V. Club's Monica Castillo described the trailer, is a wardrobe with an apple tree carved into its wood. Anyone who grew up on C. S. Lewis knows where that wardrobe is headed. Greta Gerwig's Narnia: The Magician's Nephew is about where it came from.

Netflix's Tudum lays out the dates: IMAX sneak previews start February 10, 2027, the film opens in IMAX and regular theaters on February 12, and it arrives on Netflix on April 2. It's the first screen version of Lewis's 1955 prequel, and TheWrap notes it's Gerwig's follow-up to Barbie. The idea that runs through everything released so far is simple: Gerwig is staging Narnia as a rock opera, a world you hear before you see. That's what the trailer, the casting of Aslan and that rare Zeppelin song are all pointing at.

What the Trailer Quietly Gives Away

Gerwig premiered the trailer on October 13 at a sneak-peek event in New York, with Stephen Colbert moderating. Castillo's A.V. Club write-up walks through it beat by beat. Two kids play in a London still scarred by the Blitz. They ask their odd neighbor, Uncle Andrew (Daniel Craig), whether he's a magician, and he tells them yes. A yellow ring sets things floating. Then the montage opens up: the green Wood Between the Worlds, the White Witch against snow, a quick look at Digory's mother (Carey Mulligan), a villain in a disco dress against a glowing red set. A voice asks, "Have you ever seen a world born?" Aslan roars, and color rushes out to the edges of the frame.

The song wasn't easy to get. According to Tudum, Led Zeppelin had never licensed "Stairway to Heaven" for a trailer, so Gerwig went to Robert Plant and Jimmy Page herself. She told Colbert why: "It's a narrative about a spiritual journey," she said, adding, "This is exactly the story of the movie." The A.V. Club adds that both men like Lewis's books, which helped.

Castillo notes that the trailer starts on the song's slow first chords and lets the title arrive with a rock-fueled flourish right after Aslan's roar. In other words, the creation of Narnia is timed to the music, and that's a promise the finished film will have to keep on a theater sound system.

A Lion With a Bowie Stripe

Gerwig has been talking about sound from the start. "I fell in love with the gorgeously improbable but completely brilliant concept of a cosmic lion singing the world of Narnia to life," she said in Netflix's announcement. Syfy Wire reports that she "wanted a rock opera" and named David Bowie, Paul McCartney, David Gilmour, Pete Townshend, Page and Plant as touchstones.

That's where the lion comes in. Meryl Streep voices Aslan, and TheWrap reports that the concept art gives him a red stripe across the face and eyes of two different colors, a tribute to Bowie. Gerwig said she wanted an actor "older than 70, so there was a wisdom of experience, but who also had the capacity of fresh wonder, like a child," as TheWrap quoted her. TheWrap also notes that Streep worked with Gerwig before, on 2019's Little Women.

The music behind the singing comes from Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, who previously worked with Gerwig on Barbie, with George Drakoulias as music supervisor, per Tudum. A singing lion, a Zeppelin song, the Barbie music team. Nearly every piece of this movie shown so far has been about how it will sound.

Who's Who

The cast as Tudum lists it, with roles as reported by Syfy Wire, the A.V. Club and Wikipedia:

• David McKenna and Beatrice Campbell as Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, the two kids. Both are newcomers. Gerwig told the New York audience, in Tudum's account, that she auditioned thousands of children and knew she had her pair when McKenna noticed Campbell sniffling during a screen test and quietly signaled for a tissue.
• Daniel Craig as Uncle Andrew Ketterley. Gerwig called him "the stupidest magician in the world who actually made magic," according to Syfy Wire.
• Emma Mackey as Jadis, the future White Witch. Mackey told Syfy Wire the script describes her as "all chaos and bad plans."
• Carey Mulligan as Mabel Kirke, Digory's mother.
• Meryl Streep as the voice of Aslan.
• Ciarán Hinds, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Denise Gough and Susan Wokoma round out the cast. Their roles haven't been announced.

Built by Hand in a Bombed-Out London

Lewis set his story in the early 1900s. Syfy Wire reports that Gerwig moved it to Britain after World War II, which explains the rubble in the trailer. Wikipedia's production history says filming began on August 11, 2025, around Bank Station and the Royal Exchange in the City of London, then moved to Shepperton Studios and wrapped on January 31, 2026.

Much of what you see was physically built. The A.V. Club describes two featurettes shown at the New York event, with sets recreating the bomb-damaged streets of the 1940s and the magical worlds, and artisans making costumes and effects by hand. Tudum's crew list shows who did the building: cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, costume designer Jacqueline Durran, creature effects supervisor Neal Scanlan and visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin. That's a team that can make a talking horse feel like it has weight, which matters in a story where, in the book, a horse ends up with wings.

Gerwig also did her reading. She told Colbert, per Tudum, that she reread everything Lewis wrote, plus the books that inspired him: "I went to Oxford, I went to Cambridge, I went to Belfast, trying to align myself with what his interior life would be." The A.V. Club adds that she copied out the lines that "gave me goosebumps," and ate a lot of Turkish Delight along the way.

The Story Under the Spectacle

Spoiler warning: this section describes how Lewis's 1955 novel ends. The film may change it.

Under the rings and the witch, The Magician's Nephew is about a boy whose mother is dying. LitCharts' summary of the novel follows the thread: Aslan sends Digory to a walled garden for a silver apple, Jadis tempts him to take one for himself, and he brings it back instead. Later he gets an apple that heals his mother. He buries the core in his London backyard, a tree grows, and years later, after a storm knocks it down, he has its wood made into a wardrobe.

That's why the carved apple tree in the trailer's first shot hits so hard once you know the book. Every child who has sat by a sick parent knows Digory's bargain: the wish to grab the cure and run. Lewis lets him give it up and then receive it as a gift, and it's hard not to see that as the real heart of the book, more than any spell. At the New York event, as Tudum quoted her, Gerwig said she has now adapted "the two big books of my life as a child," Little Women and Narnia. Lady Bird was built around a mother and a child, too. This time the child is a boy trying to keep his mother alive, and Gerwig has put Carey Mulligan in that sickroom.

How and Where to Watch

• February 10, 2027: IMAX-only sneak previews begin.
• February 12, 2027: wide release in IMAX and theaters. Netflix distributes in the US and Canada; Sony Pictures handles the rest of the world, per Tudum. In the UK, Sony's own trailer bills it for February 11. Wikipedia notes there's no theatrical release in France.
• April 2, 2027: streaming on Netflix.

That's about seven weeks in theaters before it streams, and TheWrap reports it's Netflix's first major theatrical release. Netflix had first dated it for November 2026, according to NarniaWeb, before moving it to February for the wider theatrical run. "I only know how to write for the big screen," Gerwig told the New York crowd, per the A.V. Club. If you can, take her at her word and see the creation scene in IMAX.

Lewis's novel ends exactly where Gerwig's trailer begins, with a wardrobe built from an apple tree in a London backyard. Until February, Middle-earth can fill the fantasy gap: our guide to The Rings of Power Season 3 covers the season where Sauron forges the One Ring. And when you play the Narnia trailer again, pause on that first shot and look closely at the apple tree carved into the wardrobe door.

Narnia: The Magician's Nephew opens in theaters February 12, 2027 (IMAX previews from February 10) and streams on Netflix April 2, 2027.