Meryl Streep’s Casting as Aslan in ‘The Magician’s Nephew’ Sparks Christian Backlash
The casting has drawn criticism from some Christian commentators, while Gerwig said she wanted an actor with gravitas, depth and childlike wonder.
- Director Greta Gerwig and Netflix confirmed Friday that Meryl Streep will voice Aslan in The Magician's Nephew, with theatrical release scheduled for February 12, 2027, followed by Netflix premiere on April 2, 2027.
- Gerwig told Empire she envisioned the adaptation as a 'rock opera,' stating 'David Bowie saved my life. Narnia is literally a world made out of music,' and sought an actor older than 70 with both gravitas and 'capacity of fresh wonder, like a child.'
- Social media erupted with criticism from MAGA voices and religious commentators arguing Aslan symbolizes Christ; one user wrote, 'This is insane. It's a male lion, the king of beasts and it parallels Christ. This completely changes the story.'
- Pastor L. David Fairchild of Cross and Crown in Waxahachie, Texas, called Streep's casting 'astonishingly arrogant' and 'an act of creative vandalism,' while Lutheran commentator Liam McCollum said Lewis 'would've hated Gerwig's deconstruction and subversion of Aslan.'
- The previous Narnia trilogy with Liam Neeson grossed around $1.5 billion globally, setting a financial benchmark Gerwig's adaptation must navigate alongside mounting cultural backlash before February 12, 2027.
26 Articles
26 Articles
The Lion, The Witch, And The Audacity Of Netflix
I want to start with this story. It sounds unimportant, but it is not unimportant because as my mentor and friend Andrew Breitbart used to say, culture is upstream of politics.The greatest work of Christian apologetics — made into a metaphor for children — is being turned into a film in which the main character — who stands for Jesus — is being made into a David Bowie bisexual rock-singer-based lion, voiced by a Left-wing actress. C.S. Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia” is being remade by Netflix, and they hired Greta Gerwig — for reasons no one can discern — to direct it, and she released an image of Aslan, the metaphorical Jesus figure in the story.Not only that, the metaphorical image has now been made into a lion with two differently colored eyes. Why did she do that? According to Empire Online, she did this because she wanted to channel David Bowie. She also has cast Meryl Streep to voice Aslan the Lion in “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Gerwig said, “I wanted someone who was profound but not pretentious, who had gravitas but not morose self-seriousness. Someone who could communicate depth and pathos as well as joy and delight.”C.S. Lewis is the most famous Christian apologist of the last century and a half. In “The Chronicles of Narnia,” he lays out his philosophy on Christianity in a metaphorical fairy tale designed for kids.Here’s a quote from C.S. Lewis about what the books were supposed to be:Supposing by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them, for the first time, appear in their real potency. Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could. In other words, the cynicism with which people approach religion, the sort of tiredness and hackneyed nature of going to a church, Lewis could strip away by making it into a story that people wanted to read, by making it into a metaphor. The goal was to teach children in the West the values of Christianity and its story through metaphor. We’re not talking about some strange take on the Gospels for adults, like “The Last Temptation of Christ,” or some movie comedy that mocks Jesus. We’re talking about a tool its author originally intended to introduce Western kids to Christian ideas and figures. And only a sick culture would take that thing designed for kids and pervert it and turn it instead into a vehicle for secular politics. That is what Hollywood is actually doing. This is where you come into the Greta Gerwig of it all.Greta Gerwig directed a film version of “Little Women,” gave it a feminist take, and directed “Barbie,” which is an atrocity. Greta Gerwig used to go to church fairly regularly. She says she appreciates Catholicism, but she was Unitarian. If the symbol for Catholicism is a crucifix, the symbol for Unitarianism is a question mark.But she’s also said that the reason that she was attracted to Catholicism was because of the Virgin Mary, which she openly connected with pagan energy. Here’s what she said: “It feels like this God the Father thing is a bit alienating for me, but to engage with the idea of a woman as the Mother, it seems like it’s connected to a more pagan type of religion.”She also said, “I am interested in what women do in spaces that are primarily male, in structures that are patriarchal. Most religions and religious institutions fall into this category.”In other words, her goal is to read Left-wing social values, particularly feminism, into traditional religious values. And Hollywood decided she was perfect. They handed off the movie franchise to her, and her first move was to hire a woman, Meryl Streep, a very, very Left-wing woman, to voice Aslan, the metaphorical representation of Jesus in the books, obviously an incredibly male character. She decided to create imagery around Aslan that’s designed to mimic a rock star, bisexual David Bowie. Why isn’t this frivolous? Why does this matter? Because in any society, how you teach your kids shows how you view your society and your aspirations for the future. If you take religious iconography designed for kids and you turn it on its head for the sake of subversiveness for kids, that is stupid and wrong. It is one thing to do this sort of thing for adults. They can discern. But this is a children’s story designed to appeal to children, and what Hollywood is doing here is trying to subvert Narnia’s basic ideas.And then they’ll say, “Why are you upset?”This is face tattoo syndrome. That’s when you go into your local Starbucks, and there’s some weird dude behind the counter with a gigantic face tattoo, and you stare at it. The guy growls, “You! What are you looking at?” And you stammer, “It’s like, well, I mean, it’s the face tattoo.”If you take a cherished and beloved piece of children’s literature that is a metaphor for the New Testament, and then you decide that you’re going to get a Left-wing director to subvert all of the assumptions of that piece of work, and then we notice, that is not our fault. That is your fault.For the leftists in the audience pretending not to understand what’s at work here, this is like if the Daily Wire decided to do a Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic for kids designed to teach them social values and feminism. And then we cast Bill Cosby in the title role.It would be weird, and it would not be good. This is what Hollywood is doing, but this is also where we are as a culture.We can all feel it. We have moved beyond a pure and innocent love for our basic civilizational principles. Everyone is now ironic about all of these things, or openly mocks them.When somebody talks about the things that our parents and grandparents used to take for granted as fundamentals of our society and says, “God, freedom, family, the American flag, all those terms sound strangely parochial and anachronistic. They sound like a throwback to the 1950s. What are you living in, 1950s white picket-fence land? Don’t you know we’re more sophisticated than that now?” I don’t think most Americans like that. I think most Americans still resonate with those traditional ideas.
The lion, the witch, and the worldview war
The internet already knows what to do with the news that Meryl Streep will voice Aslan in Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew”: Get angry. It fits the logic of rage-bait: All publicity is good publicity.There has already been plenty of fury. It is as if the creative team opened its first meeting by asking, “There is a huge built-in Christian audience for Narnia. How can we alienate it as quickly as possible?” But I want to …
The magic of Narnia will return to the cinemas with a new adaptation that is beginning to reveal its first details. Empire presented the first official images of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, production directed by Greta Gerwig and based on the fantastic universe created by C. S. Lewis. The film will arrive at the cinemas on February 12, 2027 and will later be available at Netflix, from April 2.
Director Greta Gerwig, who was most successful with the hit Barbie, will present her next project in theaters in February. It is a new adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia, which will adapt the plot of the first installment of the series, The Wizard's Nephew. Meryl Streep will play the beloved lion Aslan.
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