If I linked to every story out there about Hollywood’s quest for the next big fantasy franchise, I’d never get any work done. But this piece by Jamie Portman of CanWest News Service is worth citing here, if only to fact-check a couple of statements.
First, a small and rather trivial matter of box-office statistics:
Prince Caspian is the second of Christian academic C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia to be filmed, and Disney is promising a movie even more spectacular than the one that grossed US$742-million worldwide, making it the studio’s most successful live-action film ever.
That may have been true a year ago, but Narnia was easily beat last summer by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which is one of only three films ever to gross over $1 billion worldwide.
Second, the identification of my colleague’s church affiliation:
The cast [of The Golden Compass] also includes Nicole Kidman in a piece of controversial casting as the villainous Mrs. Coulter, the woman who joins forces with a demon monkey to conduct the experiments on behalf of the sinister “General Oblation Board.” Pullman’s use of the world “oblation” is like a red flag to Roman Catholic groups because the term defines the offering of bread and wine during mass. Catholic film critic Jeffrey Overstreet, was appalled that Kidman had signed for such a project.
“Why would Nicole Kidman, who identifies herself as a Catholic, participate in a fantasy that goes out of its way to declare her own faith as a heap of lies?” Overstreet asked. “The saga doesn’t stop there — it restages Adam and Eve’s fall as a triumph of the human spirit and depicts God as somebody who needs to be overthrown.”
In fairness, Portman seems to have pinched this last quote from an article that appeared in The Observer six months ago — and they, in turn, took the quote from this post at Jeffrey’s blog. But either way, if Jeffrey has swum the Tiber, it’s news to me!
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