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More articles about: Chronicles of Narnia:

CS Lewis books to hit silver screen

ReligionNewsBlog.com • Friday August 9, 2002

Movie rights to works sold off
Belfast Telegraph, 07 August 2002
http://www.headinout.co.uk/arts/story.jsp?story=322430

WORKS by the famous Ulster-born author CS Lewis may follow Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings as the next Hollywood movie sensation.

The film rights to the Chronicles of Narnia, the writer’s Christian-theme children’s fantasy series from the 1950s, have been bought by Walden Media, a New York production company.

At present, there are plans to film just one of the seven books in the series – The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Walden is aiming for a mid-2004 release and has hired a director, Andrew Adamson, who made the computer-generated film Shrek.
[...]

Fantasy fiction has enjoyed a massive revival of fortunes in recent years. One of Lewis’s friends and contemporaries was JRR Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings. The movie version was a box-office smash last year.

CS Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham, who is head of the family literary estate, lives in the Republic and said: “It has been our dream for many years not simply to make a live-action version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but to do so while remaining faithful to the novel.”

The film project coincides with an initiative by the publisher HarperCollins to market the Narnia books for a new generation.