LOS ANGELES
The biggest movie trailer of the year, by the numbers now attached to it, belongs to a film that does not open for another four months. Deadline reported, citing WaveMetrix viewership data shared after Netflix's earnings call, that the first trailer for Greta Gerwig's Narnia: The Magician's Nephew was viewed 481.3 million times in its first seven days online. If the figure holds, it is not just a strong launch for a family fantasy film — it is the kind of number streamers usually associate with franchise sequels and Super Bowl spots, and it reframes what Netflix is attempting with this release well before a single ticket has been sold.
The comparisons reported alongside the total are what turned a marketing metric into a news story. According to the WaveMetrix figures covered by Deadline and picked up by SuperHeroHype, the Narnia trailer's first week more than doubled the 240 million views that Gerwig's own Barbie trailer drew in its first seven days — a benchmark that itself was considered exceptional in 2023. It also ran ahead of Wonka, which posted 237.2 million views in its comparable window, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which reached 281.6 million. In other words, the trailer outperformed the launch weeks of the director's own billion-dollar hit and of the most prominent family releases used as yardsticks in the same reporting.
The rollout itself was staged like an event rather than a drop. The trailer debuted on October 13, 2026, at an IMAX presentation at the AMC Lincoln Square theater in New York, where Gerwig appeared in conversation with Stephen Colbert, according to the coverage by Deadline and Martin Cid Magazine. The choice of an IMAX screen for a trailer premiere was a statement of scale: Netflix, a company built on at-home viewing, introduced its most theatrical title in one of the most prominent large-format auditoriums in the country, in front of an invited audience, a week before the numbers arrived to justify the gesture.
Then there is the music. The trailer is scored to Led Zeppelin's “Stairway to Heaven,” and multiple outlets noted that the placement marks the first time the band has licensed the song for use in a film trailer. Led Zeppelin's catalog is famously guarded, and the band's songs surface in films rarely and expensively. Building the entire emotional arc of a first look around the most famous rock recording of the 1970s was a risk: done badly, it reads as borrowing grandeur. Judging by the response measured in the WaveMetrix data, audiences instead read it as an announcement that this adaptation intends to play at the scale of the books' reputation — C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories have been in print continuously since the 1950s and remain among the best-selling book series in the world.
The online reaction matched the staging. Per the reporting, the trailer trended at No. 1 on X, became the top trending movie trailer on YouTube, and briefly crashed NarniaFilm.com under the weight of traffic. Netflix supported the launch with a global paid media campaign that included spots during NFL broadcasts — the same mass-reach inventory streamers usually reserve for their biggest series premieres. Taken together, the campaign describes a studio treating a trailer not as a teaser for a marketing campaign, but as the campaign's main event, with the paid spend of a blockbuster opening weekend attached to it.
A theatrical bet, not a streaming drop
The release plan is as much a story as the view count. The film is scheduled to open in theaters on February 12, 2027, with an exclusive 49-day theatrical window before it becomes available for streaming — an unusually long and explicitly protected window for a Netflix production, and the clearest sign yet that the company sees this title as a theatrical franchise launch rather than a platform exclusive. Sony Pictures handles international distribution, per the reported deal structure, giving the film a traditional studio's overseas machinery behind it. It is a hybrid model — a streamer financing and controlling the asset, a legacy studio distributing internationally, and exhibitors getting a real window — of the kind the industry has predicted for years and rarely seen executed at this budget level.
The business context matters here. As Previously reported earlier today, Legendary Entertainment has submitted a takeover offer for Lionsgate, the studio behind John Wick and The Hunger Games — another sign that franchise libraries and proven story worlds are the currency every major player is now chasing. Narnia is precisely that kind of asset: seven books, a built-in multigenerational audience, and a prequel entry point — The Magician's Nephew is chronologically the first story in Lewis's series, explaining the creation of Narnia itself — that lets a new film series start at the beginning rather than remake the most familiar chapter.
The cast Gerwig assembled
The ensemble reported for the film is built for both prestige and four-quadrant reach. Emma Mackey plays Jadis, the White Witch, in her origin as the empress who destroys her own world before arriving in Narnia. Daniel Craig plays Uncle Andrew, the vain, cowardly magician whose experiments set the plot in motion. Carey Mulligan is in the cast, Ciarán Hinds appears, and Meryl Streep provides the voice of Aslan, the lion who sings Narnia into existence in Lewis's prequel — a casting choice that underlines how much of this film rests on voice and presence, since its central creative act is literally a song.
For Gerwig, the stakes are personal as well as commercial. Barbie made her one of the few directors whose name alone can open a film, and the reported trailer data suggests that marquee value has transferred: audiences did not just show up for Narnia, they showed up at more than twice the rate they showed up for the follow-up campaign to a cultural phenomenon. The honest caveat is that trailer views measure curiosity, not ticket sales, and February releases live or die on word of mouth after opening weekend. But a 481.3 million-view first week, a song license no trailer has ever had, a crashed website and a 49-day window amount to something specific: Netflix has made its largest-ever argument that this film is an event. The next argument gets made on February 12, in theaters, where it counts.
Online reaction since the debut has been loud and, in places, divided, with fan discussion focused on the film's look and faithfulness to Lewis's book — though the verifiable record, for now, is the viewership data and the release structure, and on both counts the launch has exceeded every comparable title in the reported set. Readers can follow the film and the wider slate on Previously's Browse pages and in the newsroom as the February release approaches.
