Controversy aside, the Walt Disney Company is pinning a lot of hopes on The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe to be the launchpad for a Narnia franchise. “A sustainable mega-hit would give a big boost to Disney’s movie unit,” reports Business Week, “which lost an estimated $300 million during the summer.” Meanwhile, Newsweek trumpets its “exclusive look at a rough cut” while posing two key questions concerning the film’s potential: “Will the movie be too religious for a wide audience? Might it not be religious enough for Lewis’s Christian fans?” Their answer? The film’s “only as Christian as you want it to be.” Which, for many fans and scholars, is quite a lot, thank you very much.
Meanwhile, John J. Miller (whose political book reviews I edited at Amazon years ago) tackles another long-running Narnian controversy: Do you read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe first, or The Magician’s Nephew? The answer to this one’s actually fairly straightforward…