What Went Wrong - The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
By Shalimar Sahota
May 3, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Disney had co-produced The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe with Walden Media and released the film to success in December 2005, earning an incredible $745 million worldwide. With a result like that, it looked like they had a fantasy franchise that could rival Harry Potter, so they went ahead and adapted C.S. Lewis’ following story, Prince Caspian.
A year has passed since the Pevensie children stepped through the wardrobe to visit Narnia. Peter (William Mosley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) are in England and on their way to boarding school. On the platform of the London Underground, the walls strip away and they suddenly find themselves transported back to Narnia. However, in Narnia, 1,300 years have passed and it is now ruled by the Telmarines, led by Lord Miraz (Sergio Castellito). The Pevensies discover that Miraz’s nephew Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes) is the one who summoned them, hoping that they’ll help him win back the throne taken from him by his uncle.
The film had a monumental production budget of $225 million. Director Andrew Adamson returned to direct the sequel. In wanting to make it more epic in scale, he said in an interview with IGN (while still shooting the film), “Believe it or not, this one I wanted to be bigger and I am regretting that decision now.” He commented on the reason for his decision, saying, “This film is bigger than the last one because I learned to do things last time and so I've created new challenges for myself, to make it more complicated and bigger, which creates a better experience for the audience as well.”
The book itself was not so simple to adapt. “About a third of the book is told in flashback,” said producer Mark Johnson. “We found that didn’t work for us. So we made some changes there, but all sympathetic to the book… we’ve also brought the girls more into the action.” The latter refers to Anna Popplewell, who was rather upset that in the first film her character Susan was given a bow and quiver full of arrows, but not really given the chance to use them. Caspian’s age is hinted in the book as being about Peter’s age (Peter is aged 14 around this time). The decision was made to have Caspian played by the older Ben Barnes (who turned 26 during shooting), largely to match William Mosley as Peter, who had turned 20. The film also suggests a possible romance between Caspian and Susan. A night raid on Miraz’s castle, something lightly hinted at in the book, is also a new inclusion to the film.
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was released in December 2005, making use of the Christmas slot that was previously occupied by the Lord of the Rings trilogy from 2001 to 2003 (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events tried in 2004, but it was far from a bona fide replacement). Disney targeted the film towards church groups due to its Christian allegories, with some churches promoting the film and even organizing trips to the cinema. Coupled with the benefit of playing over the Christmas holiday meant that it spent nine weeks in the US top ten.
Prince Caspian did not have a Christmas release date, but instead opened on May 16, 2008. It was slotted between two major movie behemoths; Iron Man, released the week before, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which was released the following week. Before its release, analysts were predicting an opening weekend higher than the first film’s $65 million. According to some reports, Disney had spent an additional $175 million on marketing the film worldwide. Given the worldwide gross of the first film, they were probably expecting the sequel to hit closer to a billion.
Being the only film in wide release when it opened, Prince Caspian had no problems reaching the top spot with an opening weekend total of $55 million. It can’t help but be compared, for everyone could see that it was slightly less than what The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe opened with; disappointing but nonetheless a decent total. The following week Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opened, so it was down to #2 with a take of $22.7 million. Spending five weeks in the US top ten, Prince Caspian finished with a domestic gross of $141.6 million, much lower than the previous film’s $291.7 million. With an overseas gross of $278 million, Prince Caspian earned $419 million worldwide.
“We felt that for that film, we had to try to appeal to every audience,” said Disney’s now former studio head Dick Cook on Prince Caspian’s release. “The movie was edgier and tougher and the marketing materials reflected that. Sometimes when you do that, you risk alienating the families and maybe that’s what happened.” Cook also justified the decision to release the film in summer, citing how Warner Bros. did just as well when they did the same thing to Harry Potter. “Release dates are funny,” said Cook. “They never seem to effect a movie people really want to see.” And maybe that’s just it. After The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the other factor here is that some people probably just didn’t "really" want to see Prince Caspian.
Studios had already been rushing to buy the rights to whatever they thought might be the next Harry Potter, and following the release of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, they began to dish them out to the public. The children’s fantasy genre became saturated with the likes of The Golden Compass, Eragon, The Spiderwick Chronicles as well as Walden Media’s own The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep and Bridge to Terabithia. By the time Prince Caspian came around, the target audience was now three years older, and with some of them having digested their share of children’s fantasy, they probably weren’t sticking around for a sequel. Instead they were most likely moving on towards PG-13 material… like… Twilight.
While Prince Caspian has shades of the Biblical, be it Lucy’s faith in Aslan or a close resemblance to the story of King David, it did not have the huge Christian backing the first film did. According to the C.S. Lewis Society of California, Disney did not market the film to Christians the same way they marketed The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, citing how Disney “would not pursue any special marketing of the film to churches and other Christian markets.” The first film was marketed by Motive Entertainment, the same company that marketed The Passion of the Christ to success. Maybe Disney thought they could have done without them the second time around, as Motive did not return for Prince Caspian. The C.S. Lewis Society concluded that Disney instead presented Prince Caspian as a “strictly secular and violent, fantasy/adventure/romance, and the result was all too predictable.”
Within two weeks after it opened, Robert Iger, the CEO at Disney also cited the summer scheduling as one of the reasons why Prince Caspian faltered, saying, “I think there are too many movies being released in the marketplace. It’s a very delicate, very fragile marketplace.” And they couldn’t see that before? Still, Iger called it, “a good lesson,” saying, “It just informs us that much more of what we need to do.”
The lesson was learnt on December 24, 2008, when Disney announced that they would no longer be producing the follow-up film The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with Walden Media. Their reason was said to be “budgetary considerations and other logistics.” Now, almost anything could come under the vague “other logistics.” However, there’s a theory that Disney wanted the film to fail so that they could get out of having to produce a third film and split earnings with Walden Media, hence the mismanaged marketing. Given the huge marketing cost for the film I find this hard to believe, though taking into account Prince Caspian’s earnings, it seems logical why Disney would want out.
In January 2009 came the news that 20th Century Fox would co-finance The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with Walden Media. While the third film was in post-production, producer Johnson admitted, “We made some mistakes with Prince Caspian and I don't want to make them again,” describing how it was “a little bit too rough” and too much of a “boys’ action movie.” After the mega budget that Prince Caspian went through, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader had a leaner production budget of around $140 million (eventually topping out to $155 million).
I was actually quite disappointed with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. I found it okay, but it felt like fantasy-lite, going down the now very familiar route like many other fantasy films, leading up to yet another big battle. Prince Caspian looked like more of the same to me, so upon its release I gave it a miss. Having now seen it, I find it to be no better or worse than the previous film. For the first half hour, it’s actually quite boring, though things pick up slightly once Caspian and the Pevensie children meet. In the book they don’t meet till much later and it seems a good move shifting their eventual encounter forward. Following this, it goes down the same "gearing up for battle" path. Peter’s one-on-one duel with Lord Miraz is a nice highlight, but Miraz himself is just not as strong a villain as the White Witch. He has no magical power; he’s just a man. The final battle itself with the Telmarines and Narnians feels overblown and fails to excite.
The Chronicles of Narnia is only three films in. While this franchise managed to get at least some way through the source material, it’s looking very unlikely that it’ll continue. Walden Media’s contract with the C.S. Lewis Estate has now expired, meaning that they no longer own the rights to produce another Narnia film. One thing is for sure, Disney is unlikely to let any more Andrew’s that have previously worked as animators helm their big budget productions.