(READ: The Lie of the “Modern Audience”)

“Rings of Power” could be considered the greatest financial failure for a singular streaming service product, but who knows? Disney is still out there making bad decisions every day.

While it’s unlikely that Netflix will ever sink over a billion dollars into a singular season of a show, it looks like it wants to fail a beloved story in the same way Amazon failed Tolkien’s. Not that long ago, the service got its hands on the rights to C.S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Based on what I’ve read thus far about what they’re doing with it, I can’t stress enough that Netflix needs to sell it off to a different studio.

According to Bounding Into Comics, Netflix has put Greta Gerwig in charge of developing a Narnia series. If you follow entertainment news at all, you’ve likely heard Gerwig’s name floating around. She’s the director of 2023’s Barbie movie, a film being hailed by its cast and crew as a hyper-feminist film that comments on things like patriarchy and capitalism.

That’s bad enough, but it would appear that Gerwig’s storyline of Barbie turns a Biblical story on its head.

One critic from The Playlist states that Barbie “inverts and gender-flips the Garden of Eden myth. A female deity (Rhea Perlman’s Ruth Handler) conjures a woman related to her own image and gives her a companion of the opposite gender (Ryan Gosling’s Ken) defined by their relationship to the first creation. Just as the term ‘woman’ derived from its relationship to ‘man,’ Barbie’s male counterpart was only ‘& Ken’ – never on his own. It’s thus Ken, tempted by the forbidden fruit rendered as patriarchal ideology, who strays and spoils Barbie Land.”

This is who they’ve put in charge of telling an incredible epic tale written by a man who did so as a way to introduce Christ and the principles of Christianity to children.

Once again, we’re seeing a major studio hand the keys to something greater men had written to people who seem incapable of understanding the product they now control. In this case, Gerwig’s commentary on Catholicism in films she’s directed like Lady Bird shows that she’s not incapable of understanding the impact of religion on a person’s life, but she’s clearly politically inclined and that’s all you need to ruin a movie or series.

If she’s willing to use Biblical stories to morph them into leftist political narratives, then what will she do with Lewis’s work, which features masculine themes, patriarchal forms of government, and a false queen that brings the land into an eternal cold?

There are a lot of themes in “The Chronicles of Narnia” that do not mix with the modern sentiments of Hollywood and the mainstream entertainment industry, and I don’t think it’s hard to figure out what route she’s going to take provided the examples that we have from other studios today.

She’ll likely push the male characters into the background by making them weak or unintelligent and elevate the female characters to being the real brains and power. She’ll probably make Jadis a misunderstood villain instead of the force of evil within Narnia, and the entire thing will likely be sapped of its deeper meanings as its stories are sterilized and made “safe” for “modern audiences.”

All that would be inexcusable enough, but what would be the most unforgivable move would be the neutering of Aslan.

Lewis wrote Aslan and an allegory for Christ. Everything Aslan does in the story is based on an example Christ set and Lewis followed. Aslan even hints at his true identity to Edmund, Lucy, and Eustace in “Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” Even if Gerwig chooses to respect the story and leave her personal politics out of it, it all falls apart if she shoves that aspect of Aslan away.

The entirety of the Chronicles of Narnia hinges on Aslan being respected for who and what he is. Lessening Aslan’s importance or negating his influence on Narnia and its denizens collapses the whole story. Sadly, it’s here that I see Gerwig failing the hardest.

The modern entertainment industry detests Christianity and they mock Christ with reckless abandon. Netflix’s writers, alongside a very feminist Gerwig, are about as likely to keep Narnia’s Christian themes intact as they are to stick their hand into a pile of fire ants.

Believe me, no one will be happier to be proven wrong than I would be on this, but I’m already predicting disaster. I’m willing to bet that this will somehow turn into an ideological self-insert from Gerwig and the writers that will strip Lewis’s work of all its charm and meaning in order to turn it into a delivery system for modern Hollywood sentiment.

If we’re lucky, Netflix will cancel this production before it starts getting off the ground and they’ll sell it to a more worthy studio like Angel.