Greta Gerwig’s Narnia adaptation has not reached theaters, but one creative choice is already causing a headache for readers who care about the books’ timeline. The Magician’s Nephew is shifting its real-world setting from around 1900 to post-war Britain in the 1950s, and that change could make the wider chronology harder to connect.
The decision is more than a costume update. In C. S. Lewis’s novel, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer discover the Wood between the Worlds, meet Jadis and witness Aslan create Narnia. The story takes place decades before the events of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when Digory is an elderly professor. Moving his childhood into the 1950s means the familiar wardrobe story would need to move forward as well if the film series wants to preserve the same gap between events.
That is where the concern starts. The Pevensie children enter Narnia after being sent away from London during the Second World War, with the Blitz providing the reason they leave the city. If that story still takes place around 1940, a younger Digory in 1955 cannot be the same elderly professor who helps the children a few years earlier. The films could rewrite the dates, revise Digory’s age or treat the adaptation as its own continuity, but each option changes how the stories fit together.
Gerwig has offered a creative reason for the new period. The 1950s were a time of post-war hardship, with bomb-damaged streets and children growing up among the remains of a conflict that had shaped their families. She has connected that generation to the musicians who would later change British popular culture, including David Bowie. In her view, Narnia can represent the imaginative worlds children build when ordinary life offers very little comfort.
That idea gives the change a thematic purpose, rather than making it a random aesthetic choice. A bomb site becoming the starting point for a fantasy world is a striking image, and the post-war setting could give Digory and Polly a more immediate reason to seek escape. It also connects the film’s world-building to the era that produced the book, which was published in 1955.
The risk is that a rich concept can still clash with established details. Narnia’s chronology is already unusual because time moves at a different rate inside the magical world. The books do not always treat dates as the main point, but the real-world dates matter in the opening of the wardrobe story. A new adaptation can shift them, though doing so may complicate plans to tell the seven books as one continuous saga.
For now, the setting change does not prove the movie will abandon Lewis’s story. The central journey through other worlds, the creation of Narnia and Jadis’s role can survive a different decade. The question is whether Gerwig can make the new timeline feel deliberate and coherent, rather than asking viewers to ignore a detail that helped launch the original adventure.
The first trailer should provide a clearer sense of how the 1950s shape the story. Until then, fans have a fair reason to ask how the pieces will fit.
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