Are any more C.S. Lewis movies in the works?

We all know about the Chronicles of Narnia movie series, which began with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005).

And we all heard about that adaptation of The Screwtape Letters that Ralph Winter and Walden Media are developing now.

Now Mark Moring at CT Movies interviews Ken Wales — producer of Amazing Grace, Christy (1994), The Prodigal (1983), etc. — and discovers that he would like to adapt a C.S. Lewis book, too:

What other films do you want to make?

Wales: I’d like to do a sequel to Chariots of Fire, called With Wings As Eagles, that follows Eric Liddell as a missionary to China. And I’d like to do The Great Divorce, based on the book by C. S. Lewis.

Who has the rights to do The Great Divorce?

Wales: The Episcopal Radio and TV Foundation [now the Episcopal Media Center], which did the original animated version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for PBS [in 1979]. They came to me and said they had procured the rights to The Great Divorce, and they were considering me to be the producer. I was just thrilled.

Why do you want to make this into a film?

Wales: I love the world of Lewis to start with, and there’s a very good pre-awareness because of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—and more Narnia movies to come.

The Great Divorce is not about any marriage problem. It’s about the alienation of man with God. It’s that huge schism. It’s a classic story about heaven and hell—actually, heaven or hell, and the allegory and juxtaposition of those phrases. I’m a big fan of stories about making choices, and this is one of those stories. It’s about making the choices as to where you are, and where you’re going.

And I began to think about the story’s bus trip, the George MacDonald character, the Lewis character, and the others, and we can things with this in CGI that you just couldn’t do a while back. Remember Robin Williams in What Dreams May Come? There’s a lot of that type of imagery in there—and that was all done with artwork because there really wasn’t CGI stuff to do that with. Now you do that all with CGI.

But this is all pre-, pre-, pre-production talk for now.

Incidentally, the other day I chanced upon a nine-year-old article of mine on movies that were then being developed based on the works of Lewis and Tolkien. And back in 1998, I wrote:

Gresham also confirms that British filmmaker Henry Seggerman has bought the rights to produce a film adaptation of Lewis’s science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet and is now working on the second draft of the screenplay.

I wonder what ever became of that project. I would be surprised if, given all the Lewis hype now, someone wasn’t working on it.