Six years on from The Chronicles Of Narnia's last instalment, The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, it's probably fair to say that the franchise didn't quite take off in the way everybody hoped. Conceived as blockbuster material in the wake of Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings trilogy and Warners' Harry Potter series, studio Disney bailed after two films - The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe and Prince Caspian - leaving Fox to swoop in for the third. The rest was more-or-less silence, but now producer Mark Gordon has piped up to confirm that The Silver Chair is still very much a going concern.
"We’re hoping to be able to make the movie very shortly," Gordon tells Collider. "We’re very excited about it. It’s all going to be a brand new franchise. All original. All original characters, different directors, and an entire new [filmmaking] team that this is coming from."
For a time there'd been talk of The Magician's Nephew being the fourth film, before the agenda switched back to The Silver Chair. David Magee (Life Of Pi) was revealed to have been working on a screenplay in 2013.
The news of a total re-cast is hardy a surprise given that all the child actors from the previous films are now in their 20s. Eustace aside (played in Dawn Treader by Will Poulter), The Silver Chair doesn't cause many problems in that respect anyway. We haven't met Jill Pole in the films yet, and The Silver Chair's Caspian is now an old man. It'd be sad not to hear Liam Neeson giving voice to Aslan anymore though. Maybe he can bridge the reboot like Judi Dench did in the Bond films.
The rights to C.S. Lewis' books remain with The Lewis Company, so whether Fox will pick up the baton again, or whether the next Narnia will end up at another studio - its third in four films - remains to be seen. As does almost everything else, frankly. But if Gordon's "very shortly" isn't just spin, we should be reporting more very soon.