Once ‘Oppenheimer’ is dealt with, ‘Barbie’ director on course to reboot a $1.5 billion fantasy franchise for Netflix

Thanks to the early projections, we can infer that the supposed box office “battle” between Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is going to be more akin to a brutal dismemberment, with the former on course to earn up to twice as much as its rival.

That would immediately cement Gerwig as the latest filmmaker to successfully make the jump from acclaimed independent dramas to massively expensive crowd-pleasers, but it’s looking as though her next move will see her dive headfirst into the world of fantasy reboots to tackle Netflix’s long-awaited The Chronicles of Narnia.

The streaming service has held the rights to the property – which previously yielded three epics that hauled in a combined box office total north of $1.5 billion before the wheels came off – for almost half a decade, but development has been a slow and arduous process. Gerwig has been linked with the property since last year, but new details have arisen via a profile of Mattel in The New Yorker.

The article mentions Gerwig “has a deal with Netflix to write and direct at least two films based on C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia,” which sounds like quite the undertaking. Of course, plenty more doors will inevitably open at the highest reaches of the industry when Barbie decimates the box office, so committing that much time to Netflix for at least two – if not more – exhaustive big budget stories could tie her up for the foreseeable future.

Of course, that’s entirely dependent on whether or not Narnia is next, or if Gerwig wants to recharge her batteries with something smaller and decidedly different beforehand.