The trailer for Greta Gerwig's Narnia: The Magician's Nephew has made a big impact this week with its interpretation of CS Lewis's novel as a psychedelic cosmic fantasy transposed to the period when it was written.
There are a lot of big talking points, including the depiction of Aslan and the way it seems the movie may take the novel's creation myth as a means to explore the act of creation and the nature of creativity. But among Narnia fans, there's also a lot of debate around a small background detail that appears at around the 1.48 mark in the trailer below.
As shown in the post on X below, there's scene towards the end of the trailer where Jadis appears to be using magic in London, something that wasn't possible in the novel. As a possible allusion to this deviation from the literature, she also appears to destroy a reference to one of CS Lewis's favourite hangouts.
@cbradedwards yes, insanely disrespectful to have Jadis using magic right in front of it, but ironically accurate that she us literally damaging it by doing soOctober 14, 2026
The pub in the background is named the Eagle & Child, the same as a pub in St Giles', Oxford, where Lewis and JRR Tolkien's literary discussion group The Inklings would meet. There are lots of pubs in England with the same name, and the scene is presumably London, not Oxford, but it seems unlikely to be coincidental given the attention to detail in other scenes, such as when removal van logo offers a premonition of Fledge.
The movie also moves the setting around 50 years forward in time, from 1900 to the 1950s when CS Lewis was writing the novel, increasing the possibility for meta references.
Some have suggested that the inclusion of the pub is a symbolic gesture, or a "confession", intended to show that movie will break with the novel. It's been compared to how Stanley Kubrick used a yellow VW Beetle in his film of The Shining and briefly showed a damaged red Beetle as if to clarify that the movie is a different story to that of Stephen King's novel.
"They deliberately chose to destroy Lewis and Tolkien's favourite pub," one person complains on X. "She’s destroying his story, so why wouldn’t she destroy the pub that the Inklings met in?" someone else asks.
Well, every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction, Picasso supposedly said.
