What the trailer shows
David McKenna plays Digory. Beatrice Campbell plays Polly. Daniel Craig is Uncle Andrew Ketterley, and the trailer has him say that sometimes one story is the beginning of all the others. Emma Mackey’s Jadis, in a metallic dress, says, “Come to me, my power.” Carey Mulligan plays Mabel Kirke. Near the end, Ciarán Hinds’s voice asks, “Have you ever seen a world born?” and Meryl Streep’s Aslan takes shape out of dust and roars. A winged horse, Fledge, is in the cut. So is a wet London street and a pub sign that reads Eagle & Child, with a 1950s car at the curb. The September still of Jadis already put the story in the 1950s. The trailer is the first time the public can watch that choice move.
The song, and the families who had not heard one
Variety wrote that Gerwig has called Narnia “a world made out of music,” and that she went to Plant and Page because Led Zeppelin rarely licenses the catalog. She said the song is about a spiritual journey and the wrong roads a person can take, and that it fit the way she wanted to introduce the world. A week earlier, the C.S. Lewis estate families said they had not seen footage and had not heard audio. Tuesday’s trailer does not include a new statement from them. Douglas Gresham and Melvin Adams are already billed as executive producers for the estate.
The Associated Press and IndieWire both put Gerwig in a New York IMAX theater Tuesday morning, with Stephen Colbert asking the questions, before the clip went online. She told the room she makes stories for the largest screen she can get. Netflix has called this its first global theatrical release. The February plan is two days of IMAX sneaks and then a Friday, with the film on the service seven weeks later. What that week looks like in ordinary theaters, and whether the families answer the trailer, is what Tuesday left open.
