You’d think that a franchise hauling in over $1.5 billion at the box office across three films makes for a wildly successful series, but that doesn’t tell the whole story behind the first failed attempt at turning The Chronicles of Narnia into a blockbuster Harry Potter-level phenomenon.
Almost half of those earnings came from opening chapter The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe alone, with critical and commercial takings falling off a precipitous cliff once audiences had the chance to torture themselves with underwhelming successors Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
The profit margins had dwindled to such an extent that Disney dumped the property after two epic-sized adventures, with 20th Century Fox footing the eye-watering $200 million bill for the third and final movie. In the end, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader marked the end of the line for Narnia‘s stint as a viable enterprise, but that hasn’t prevented Redditors from kicking it while it lies prone.
It seems a touch on the unnecessary side to blast a project that already killed a once-promising saga when it’s already been cast onto the cinematic scrapheap, but is it really a conversation happening on the internet if there isn’t at least a little bit of negativity thrown in for good measure?
To be fair, the threequel is a crushingly dull affair, even if it remarkably runs for under two hours. It feels significantly longer, though, and a meager $415 million haul from theaters wasn’t enough to convince the bigwigs that another four vastly expensive chapters were a necessity.
A Netflix reboot remains in development, one that may or may not be eying Greta Gerwig to direct, but we’ll just have to wait and see if the second stab proves to be more palatable than the first.
