The Magician’s Nephew has always been the strange door into C.S. Lewis’s Narnia: a prequel that arrives late in the series and tells, in the plain sentences of a children’s book, how a world gets sung into being. That Greta Gerwig’s adaptation is now drawing a bigger trailer audience than her own Barbie says less about nostalgia than about Netflix, a company that built its film slate for the sofa and is now asking the public to buy a ticket.

As Deadline reported exclusively after Netflix’s earnings call, the trailer’s first week, as measured by WaveMetrix, roughly doubled what Barbie drew over the same span and outpaced both Wonka and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. It trended at the top of X, still leads YouTube’s trending movie trailers, and briefly crashed NarniaFilm.com under the traffic.

The count passed 481.3 million views in seven days, against 240 million for Barbie, 237.2 million for Wonka and 281.6 million for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

The comparison matters because every title on that list was made for cinemas first, and Narnia now is too. Netflix is giving the film a mega-wide theatrical release with an exclusive 49-day window before it reaches the service, while Sony handles theatrical distribution overseas. Deadline counts it among several big swings in the streamer’s deeper embrace of theatrical, which points to longer windows and to reporting grosses.

The smaller tests are already in. Netflix’s four-theater release of La Bola Negra in New York and Los Angeles posted an opening average of more than $69,000 per theater, the second-best ever for a non-English-language film, behind only Parasite.

Gerwig unveiled the footage on October 13 at an exclusive IMAX sneak-peek event in New York, in conversation with Late Show host Stephen Colbert, where she talked about her lifelong connection to Lewis and about giving Narnia’s origin story its first screen adaptation. The trailer also made a small piece of music history, since Led Zeppelin had never granted a sync for “Stairway to Heaven” to a film or a trailer. Jimmy Page called Gerwig “a powerhouse in the world of cinema”, and the director said she was “so moved that they allowed me to use the song.”

Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew opens in U.S. theaters on February 12, 2027.

Lewis sent his two children through a wood between the worlds, a quiet place of pools where each one leads somewhere else. Netflix’s version of that wood is the 49 days between the cinema and the sofa, and its first trailer has already brought more people to the edge of it than Barbie did.

Tags: Netflix, Greta Gerwig, barbie, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, trailer, theatrical release, Narnia: The Magician's Nephew