Some songs get licensed; a handful get guarded. “Stairway to Heaven” has long sat in the second group — the Led Zeppelin epic that filmmakers keep asking for and the band keeps refusing, so consistently that the refusal became a joke of its own. That Greta Gerwig is the director who finally got it onscreen, in the first trailer for her Netflix adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, says a good deal about what she brings to the franchise: a reading of the material that the song’s own authors recognized as kindred.

As Deadline reported, Gerwig explained the deal in a Q&A with Stephen Colbert, and her account is strikingly personal. “I showed them and I talked to them, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, and I was so moved that they allowed me to use the song,” she said. In her telling, the band agreed “because they saw the heart of the story in the film and they too love C.S. Lewis, and they have a reverence for his work.”

Her pitch was thematic. Gerwig called the track “an epic song,” “a narrative” and a song “about a spiritual journey” — one that sets “the true path of enlightenment and spirituality” against “this path of false idols and the wrong roads you can go down.” Her conclusion was simple: “This is exactly the story of this movie.” The Magician’s Nephew is Lewis’s prequel, the book about the making of Narnia, and its plot hinges on exactly that kind of wrong road: two children wake a queen who has already exterminated the population of her own city.

The list of those turned away is part of the song’s legend. Previous failed attempts include a 1995 episode of The Simpsons, Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous in 2000 and last year’s Stranger Things finale, while Mike Myers poked fun at the band’s protectiveness in a scene from Wayne’s World in 1992. Gerwig herself framed the stakes plainly: “But this song, they had not let it be used in anything.”

The film itself premieres in IMAX on February 12, 2027, before its Netflix debut on April 2. Digory (David McKenna) and Polly (Beatrice Campbell) explore the office of Digory’s Uncle Andrew (Daniel Craig) and end up in a wood of pools leading to other worlds; one takes them to a dead city, where they awaken its queen (Emma Mackey) and accidentally set her loose on London.

For decades, Plant and Page answered Hollywood with the same word. The first yes went not to a rock movie, but to a children’s fantasy about the birth of a world — and audiences heard it in a trailer.

Tags: Netflix, Greta Gerwig, trailer, Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, Narnia: The Magician's Nephew