The Chronicles of Narnia: where to start reading
Adapts The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Say how far you watched, and pick the book up exactly there.
at The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The first film adapts The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe across its full run, following the book's plot closely with only modest additions and tone changes.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) leaves off at the end of book one. Start here:
Prince Caspian
What the movies changed here
- InventedThe film opens by dramatizing the London Blitz bombing raid that sends the Pevensie children to the countryside; the book only mentions air raids in passing as backstory.
- ChangedThe book has the children wake in a cave to hear Father Christmas's sleigh bells. The film replaces this with a tense chase across a frozen river as the White Witch's wolves close in.
- InventedThe climactic battle against the White Witch's army is staged directly on screen; the book instead has Peter recount it to Aslan afterward, off the page.
- ChangedThe children bicker and snark with each other noticeably more than in the book, where Edmund is essentially the only one written as cutting.
The three Walden Media films (2005-2010) each adapt one novel, one film per book, in the original publication order: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, then Prince Caspian, then The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. That is not the only order these seven books are sold in. Lewis wrote and released them LWW-first from 1950-1956, but in 1957 an 11-year-old reader named Krieg wrote to Lewis arguing they should instead be read by internal Narnian chronology, starting with The Magician's Nephew; Lewis replied that he agreed with that order, while adding that 'perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone reads them.' When HarperCollins became the series' sole publisher in 1994, it renumbered every edition to that chronological order -- Magician's Nephew, LWW, The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Last Battle -- and that is the numbering printed on every HarperCollins spine and box set today. Many readers, literary critics, and the Walden film trilogy itself still favor original publication order for a first read, since LWW was written as the reader's own introduction to Narnia and Magician's Nephew reveals things about the world's origins that land better once you already know it. A new, unrelated Netflix film -- Narnia: The Magician's Nephew, directed by Greta Gerwig, in theaters February 12, 2027 and streaming on Netflix April 2, 2027 -- restarts the franchise from scratch with the chronologically-first book, independent of the Walden/Disney/Fox trilogy's continuity and the publication order it followed.
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