Gerwig's Narnia Trailer: Led Zeppelin, Meryl Streep's Aslan

Greta Gerwig has licensed Led Zeppelin's rarely-cleared "Stairway to Heaven" for the trailer of "Narnia: The Magician's Nephew," which reaches theaters on February 12. In the trailer, the track backs the moment Aslan — played by Meryl Streep — sings Narnia into creation.

Gerwig presented the trailer Tuesday morning in New York City, at an IMAX theater filled with writers and reporters, ahead of its online release. Stephen Colbert moderated the event. She told the room she only knows how to create visual stories for the big screen, and she needs as big a screen as possible.

That conviction had consequences. Gerwig fought hard for a theatrical release for her adaptation of C.S. Lewis's stories — a fight she won, according to IndieWire's report on the event. Netflix, the film's home, has not publicly detailed the length of the theatrical window, and the presentation left that question open.

How did Gerwig get 'Stairway to Heaven'?

She went to the sources: Robert Plant and Jimmy Page themselves. The song is seldom licensed. Its cultural journey runs from the Satanic panic era to, now, the sonic backdrop for a talking lion's act of creation.

Even from the trailer's scant footage, the report notes, Gerwig has taken a deliberately exuberant, psychedelic approach to Narnia's creation — and to the beauty of creation generally. Whether a two-minute trailer can carry that promise across a full feature remains untested.

Who is in the cast?

The story follows Polly Plummer (Beatrice Campbell) and Digory Kirke (David McKenna), new friends who discover that Digory's uncle Andrew Ketterley (Daniel Craig) may have concocted a way to move between infinite worlds. The supporting cast includes:

• Emma Mackey as Jadis, seen in the trailer in disco-ified, shining armor, set loose on London
• Meryl Streep as Aslan
• Carey Mulligan, Ciarán Hinds, Kobna Goldbrook-Smith and Denis Gough in supporting roles

Gerwig, the report notes, assembled a supporting cast as in love with Lewis's work as she is.

What does this change for the blockbuster formula?

Gerwig said she was excited to put large-scale sets and dizzying VFX toward a different use than audiences have come to expect. Movies normally, she noted, are blowing things up, destroying cityscapes and turning the ground into Minecraft blocks. "The Magician's Nephew" points all that machinery at creating things, growing things, and helping things — like a horse named Fledge — take flight.

The claim is a director's framing, offered at a promotional event, and the trailer alone cannot confirm it. But the inversion is concrete: the most expensive tools in commercial cinema, deployed for genesis rather than demolition.

Every universe's beginning, as the trailer's London chaos suggests, holds the seeds of its end. Audiences can test Gerwig's promise against the full film when it opens theatrically on February 12.