A fourth movie adaptation of a book from C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Naria series, and will be adapting The Silver Chair, book six in the seven book series. It’s already been three years since the last Narnia movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, hit theaters, but as The Silver Chair is the first Narnia story not to focus on the Pevensie children – Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy – the gap in time should be overcome easily enough.
The Silver Chair instead focuses on Eustance Scrubb, cousin to the Pevensies, who figured prominently into Dawn Treader alongside Edmund and Lucy. Eustance was portrayed by Will Poulter (We’re the Millers) in Dawn Treader, but it seems doubtful Disney will re-cast given both Poulter’s ability to play down in age (he’s 20) the story’s lack of need for Eustance to be any particular age. Eustance is accompanied on his journey in The Silver Chair by Jill Pole, a classmate, in her first trip to Narnia. No word yet on who might be in the running for the part. Indeed, the script is yet to be written (the story is currently being developed by producers Mark Gordon, Douglas Gresham, and Vincent Sieber. It’s unclear at the moment whether the project will be backed by either Disney (who distributed The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe) or Fox (Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader), or if another company will be taking over.
The production also makes adaptations of the other Narnia books, and in particular The Last Battle, which brings back many of the characters from earlier in the series, seem like far more likely a prospect. Any decision to do so is likely predicated on the box office performance of The Silver Chair, but even barring a direct sequel in The Last Battle, it certainly opens the door for someone to produce either The Magician’s Nephew or The Horse and His Boy, books one and three in the series. Both focus on protagonists as yet unseen, and although the Pevensies make an appearance in The Horse and His Boy, it is as adult kings and queens (the book takes place chronologically near the end of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, while the four siblings ruled as the kings and queens of Narnia.)
As mentioned, The Silver Chair is still very early in development, but we will continue to bring you updates, as they become available.
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