This may be one to file under "well, duh!", but Walden Media co-founder and president Cary Granat told Variety what the company has planned for The Chronicles of Narnia franchise - and specifically, what films four and five are likely to be.
Production on Prince Caspian is well underway, but they're also planning to release **The Voyage of the Dawn Treader **in 2010 - a two-year gap allowing the young cast a break and also ensuring that they're not trying to promote the former and shoot the latter at the same time.
But it's what comes next that's the news, and Granat has said that Walden is planning to follow Dawn Treader with The Silver Chair - an entirely sensible decision, since those who watched the BBC version way back when will know that that one translates pretty well to the screen. That's the one where two children (not the Pevensies we've already met) are charged with finding a lost Prince of Narnia and bringing him home, despite giants and witches and vast underground caves.
What's stranger, however, is that Granat thinks that The Magician's Nephew could be the next one to do. It's true that it has more of an adventuresome plot than The Last Battle, but it's still one of the more explicitly religious in the series, so that is perhaps a surprise. For those of you not up on your kidlit, that's the story of Narnia's creation and the origins of the White Witch and much of what is wrong with the world.
Walden has only committed to doing four or five, so it looks like we'll never see The Last Battle (too much of a downer, end of the world and all that) or The Horse and his Boy (despite arguably being the best adventure story in the series, accusations of racism may mean that it's never made).
However, Granat doesn't rule out further stories. "There are a lot of stories to be taken from the seven books," he notes. Is it just us or does that sound like he thinks there's room for "Inspired By" spin-offs? Can we all agree that that would be a Bad Thing?