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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.”

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