Zeitgeist: Spitting on the Grave of C.S. Lewis

by | Oct 5, 2026 | Zeitgeist | 0 comments

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According to Empire magazine's, Meryl Streep will voice Aslan in Greta Gerwig's Narnia: The Magician's Nephew. Nexus Point News broke the rumor in March 2025, and plenty of fans assumed it was an early April Fools' joke. On September 17, 2026, Empire made it official.

Empire also showed us the new Aslan. Gerwig's lion has mismatched eyes and a red stripe across his face, a look she built as a tribute to David Bowie. Breitbart pointed out that the design mixes fur and feathers and looks closer to a griffin than a lion. Gerwig told Empire she wanted an actor over 70 who could carry the wisdom of age and the wonder of a child. On the music, she went further: "I wanted a rock opera."

On X, Eric Metaxas wrote that casting Streep as Aslan is like casting Robert De Niro as the Virgin Mary, and that Gerwig is perverting the book for her own ends.

Breitbart headlined it as C.S. Lewis rolling in his grave.

In The Free Press, Liel Leibovitz argued the casting turns Aslan into "precisely what he is not: an allegory that may be repurposed and redesigned at will."

This is not just a Narnia problem. This problem is everywhere. And authors are partly to blame.

C.S. Lewis left little room for reinterpretation. He described Aslan as his imagined answer to what Christ might become in a world like Narnia.

Netflix Has a History of Literary Colonialism

Netflix bought the Roald Dahl Story Company in 2021. Then it brought in sensitivity readers and purged the words "fat" and "ugly" disappeared from every new edition. Mrs. Twit went from "ugly and beastly" to plain "beastly," and the editors added passages Dahl never wrote.

Dahl died in 1990. The progressives who own his books were editing his sentences 33 years later.

The Fans Have No Counter-Move

Netflix holds the screen rights to all 7 Narnia books through a 2018 deal with The C.S. Lewis Company. If you believe Gerwig is making the wrong movie, you can't make the right one. If you try, Netflix has the legal power to bankrupt your family.

British novelist Francis Spufford tried the faithful route. He spent 3 years writing The Stone Table, a novel that sends Digory and Polly back to Narnia. He asked the Lewis estate for permission and never got a reply. He printed 75 copies for friends, and The Times of London reported that the estate has turned down every request to continue the series. Under British law, Spufford can't sell his book until 2034.

Tolkien Got the Same Treatment

Lewis's fellow Inkling, J.R.R. Tolkien, fared no better. In 2017, the Tolkien estate sold Amazon the TV rights to The Lord of the Rings. The deal left out The Silmarillion, so Amazon's writers built The Rings of Power on the appendices and filled the gaps with their own inventions. Tolkien fans hate it with Fewer than half the viewers who started Season 1 going on to finish it.

Amazon locked itself into 5 seasons, with a reported $20 million penalty for every season it skips. Season 3 premieres November 11.

Every Story Has a Corporate Overlord

Star Wars: Disney paid $4.05 billion for Lucasfilm in 2012. This summer, The Mandalorian and Grogu became the lowest-grossing live-action Star Wars movie ever, and Disney's CEO admitted it underperformed. Disney's answer, according to JoBlo, is another Skywalker trilogy from director Jon Watts, with Rey expected back. Fans who want a different sequel have one legal option: wait for Disney.

Doctor Who: Disney co-funded 2 seasons starring Ncuti Gatwa at £6 million to £8 million per episode. Ratings fell after Gatwa replaced Jodie Whittaker, and an industry source told Deadline the show had become "too woke for Trump's USA." Disney walked away. The BBC kept the TARDIS, and the fans got no vote.

Star Trek: Alec Peters raised $1.1 million on Kickstarter for the fan film Axanar. Paramount and CBS sued, then wrote rules for every Star Trek fan film: a $50,000 fundraising cap, 2 episodes of 15 minutes each, and no "Star Trek" in the title. On July 26, 2026, Peters released a 21-minute film that broke those rules. It drew more than 120,000 YouTube views before a Paramount copyright claim took it down in under 3 days. Peters claims his film outdrew the free YouTube premiere of Paramount's Starfleet Academy over 48 hours, and he blames Alex Kurtzman for 10 years of mediocre Trek. An arbitrator ordered him to pay Paramount nearly $300,000 in 2023. Paramount still writes the rules, and Paramount decides how many minutes of fan love the law allows.

Copyright Was Built to Expire

For most of history, stories had no owners. Homer never licensed the Odyssey. Shakespeare took the plot of Macbeth from Holinshed's history, and nobody sued him. Even Walt Disney took adapted stories from the Grim Brothers.

Walt Disney was born in 1901, and died in 1966. The Grimm brothers died in 1859 and 1863. From Disney's birth back to Wilhelm's death is 42 years. From his birth forward to today is 125 years. Disney was born closer to the Grimms than we are to the moon landing.

Britain invented copyright in 1710 with the Statute of Anne. Authors got 14 years, plus 14 more if they lived to renew. America copied the limit in 1790: 14 years, plus 1 renewal of 14. The maximum was 28.

Run The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe through those rules. Lewis published it in 1950.

Under the original copyright law, Aslan would have gone free in 1978. Anyone could tell a Narnia story and fans would choose which stories were real. No corporation could buy a monopoly on Aslan and bankrupt anyone trying to set him free.

A Commons Lets the Best Version Win

Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843. Once the copyright expired, anyone could tell it. The Victorian Web cites 357 adaptations between 1844 and 1987. Alastair Sim played the definitive Scrooge in 1951. In 1997, a TV movie turned Scrooge into Ms. Ebenita Scrooge. Nobody had to sue anybody. Audiences kept watching Alastair Sim.

Disney made Mickey's Christmas Carol in 1983. The company built a hit on Dickens's public domain, then lobbied Congress in 1998 to keep its own mouse out of yours.

A creative commons is the cure for woke rot. When anyone can retell a story, a studio that turns the hero into an antihero has to beat the faithful version at the box office.

When one company owns the story for 95 years, the deconstruction has no rival.

The best thing you can do to protect your stories is to release them into the public domain upon your death. Don’t let your grandchildren ruin your legacy for a paycheck. Don’t poison their path to virtue with that kind of temptation.

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Commentary

Jonathan: Basically, Greta Gerwig wants to rewrite Narnia as a rock opera.

Thomas: And Aslan is going to be voiced by a woman.

Jonathan: Of course, everyone has all the reactions. You have people who are disgusted by it, and you have people getting behind it.

Thomas: They want to “own the chuds.”

Jonathan: Personally, I think this falls right into things being destroyed by woke ideology.

Thomas: It's literary colonialism. That's my new term. They long to take the stories conservatives love, take control of them, and then defile them in a way a conservative doesn't love.

Jonathan: And that's really what we want to talk about: they're taking control of it, and they can. We're talking about copyright. You can't save Narnia, because you don't own it. The rights were sold to Netflix, which can now do whatever it wants with it. Everyone is reduced to producing enough public outcry to make them stop, and that's what they wanted.

Thomas: The outcry is PR, and PR sells tickets.

Jonathan: Right. Hate-watching is a thing.

Thomas: The core problem here is copyright and how it has been distorted. When copyright was first created, it lasted only 14 years, and you could extend it another 14. That's how it worked in Britain and in the United States, and the Walt Disney Corporation lobbied to extend it.

If The Chronicles of Narnia had followed the old rules, it would have entered the public domain in 1978, and anyone could have told an Aslan story starting in 1978.

That means if somebody wanted to make a rock opera version, they could, and everybody else could say, "No, we're going to watch the real thing." Or a core fan who studied C.S. Lewis for decades, a true believer, could make a faithful modern version.

That's what you see with Sherlock Holmes. There's a new Sherlock Holmes every year from somebody different, and as fans we judge it. We all have an idea of who Sherlock Holmes is in our souls. Close your eyes and you can picture him. You have a sense of his intellect and his personality.

Sherlock Holmes can be adapted. He can be made modern, he can be made a woman, and you can choose as a consumer whether you like it. You have lots of options, and no company can bankrupt you for doing Sherlock Holmes without its permission.

This literary commons is critical for a culture. A culture needs a commons where anyone can tell a Thor story, an Odin story, or a fairy tale. What we have now, where it's all constrained, is an aberrant situation. And authors are to blame.

Many authors love their intellectual property and don't realize how it's poisoning our culture by keeping us from remixing. They don't realize they're tempting their grandchildren to sin, to sell out and ruin what they created. Every one of these IPs sits in some estate or trust, and the great ones of the past end up controlled by so many grandchildren that the only way to decide who controls the IP is who's willing to pay the most money.

That means the biggest, most corrupt corporations get the most control over our stories. We're stuck with Rings of Power, and there's nothing we can do about it. We're stuck with Starfleet Academy, the awful Star Wars, and the awful Star Trek.

You'll see true fans who want to tell a Star Trek story that's true to Star Trek raise their own money and give it away for free, and they get sued and bankrupted by the Star Trek company, because it doesn't want the competition. It doesn't want a true Star Trek story told. It wants Starfleet Academy told. Is it true to the spirit of Star Trek? Doesn't matter. They have control.

They have this weird, strange, toxic law that didn't exist until recently, which gives them perpetual ownership of intellectual property, a concept that didn't even exist 300 years ago.

There was no intellectual property for Shakespeare, and he still created great works of literature. There was no IP for Homer's Iliad or Odyssey. Still great works of literature. This idea that people won't tell great stories if they can't get ownership of their stories in the courts is just false. There's no evidence to support it.

Many of you are writing in the hope of making any money at all. Copyright law has no bearing on whether you'll write. If we are to save culture going forward, we need to start taking a stand against copyright and see it for what it is: a force of corporate control over humans.

It doesn't protect humans. Even with this big new settlement with Anthropic, most of the money is going to corporations. It's a way of giving money to corporations, not a way of encouraging human art.

I would love for the Pope, as he tries to bring humanity back to the arts, to take a stand against these awful intellectual property laws that put control over the stories in our narrative world in the hands of corporations that don't even care about profits.

Netflix could make more money with a faithful version of Narnia, but they don't care about the money. They care about desecrating the temples of their enemies, and they have the power to do it, so they are. They're violating their fiduciary duty, but who can say? "Oh, we thought it was going to be successful." They're always surprised that when they go woke, they go broke. It's a shock every time.

But it's not about making money. It's about defiling the temples of your enemies. They want to defile our temples, and they want to turn Aslan into Tashlan. C.S. Lewis saw it coming. Putting Tashlan in your story won't make it a Narnian story. It makes it a story from Tashbaan, and as far as I'm concerned, Netflix might as well be Tashbaan.

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