Greta Gerwig’s Netflix Narnia reboot is drawing Christian backlash after casting Meryl Streep to voice the Christ-like lion Aslan, a choice critics say abandons C.S. Lewis’s intent.
The fight centers on a simple fact from the books: Aslan is a male lion written as a clear stand-in for Jesus Christ. When Netflix and director Greta Gerwig moved to put Meryl Streep in that role, faith-minded viewers and industry veterans pushed back hard.
A Change.org petition that started Friday demands Netflix replace Gerwig on future Narnia films. The complaint is not about Streep’s talent. It is about rewriting a Christ figure for modern Hollywood fashion.
Fox News reported that Ned Lott, the casting and voice director who helped choose Liam Neeson for the 2005 film “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” still sees the role as sacred ground.
Lott spent years in animation with Disney, Warner Bros., and Nickelodeon. He treated Aslan the way a studio treats the voice of God.
"It’s like casting for the voice of Jesus, or the voice of God. Like, in my mind, it was very important that the character of the books, and the integrity of the books, matched the voice, and even the actor,"
Lott said. He auditioned dozens of British actors. The decision came down to the final 24 hours.
Leaving work one night, Lott prayed for help. He turned on the car radio and heard Liam Neeson on a trailer for “Kingdom of Heaven.”
"Like, literally, there was the voice of Aslan, and I didn't know who it was."
He looked Neeson up on IMDb and locked in the casting. Neeson went on to voice Aslan in three films. Lott said the team “took so much care with Aslan and really understood him.”
That care, he argued, would have ruled out a female voice in 2005. The books and the author’s design came first.
"It just seemed like a choice that we would have not made back in 2005 because we understood the integrity of the books and tried to do as much as we could with the integrity of what the author had in mind,"
Lott said. He called Gerwig’s approach “a different philosophy.”
Similar fights over iconic roles keep surfacing, from calls to keep classic heroes intact in debates over traditional casting for flagship film characters to open revolts against sequel replacements.
Dr. Ted Baehr, founder of Movieguide, spent years guarding the same allegory. He once served as president of the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation after it helped produce CBS’s 1979 animated “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” He fought then to keep Aslan an uncompromised figure for Jesus Christ.
Baehr said the books have only grown in reach.
"When I did it, they had a hundred million or more people who had read ‘Chronicles of Narnia.’ Now I'm sure it's double or triple. And most of them know that Aslan is a Christ figure, and we understand that Christ in the Revelation gets married to the church, that he's a guy, but he's fully God and Holy man. We understand all that, so with the change that they're doing, it's going to alienate a lot of Christians,"
he said.
He put numbers on the risk.
"That doesn't mean that it won't do well at the box office. It just means that there will be an extra audience, maybe 110 to 140 million Christians that may not show up because they don't like that,"
Baehr added. “You can build a movie with a lot of one group or another, so it doesn't mean the movie won't succeed, it just means it'll lose an audience.”
Baehr spoke briefly with Gerwig. She told him his version was her favorite as a young woman and that she “comes at it from a different point of view.” Gerwig has described herself as a Unitarian Universalist and a churchgoer. She is 43 and is writing and directing “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew,” based on C.S. Lewis’s 1955 novel.
Faith audiences have already shown they will push back when studios revise sacred symbols, a pattern also clear in coverage of Christians objecting to the Streep Aslan casting itself.
Gerwig told Empire she wanted someone “profound but not pretentious, who had gravitas but not morose self-seriousness,” a performer who could show “depth and pathos as well as joy and delight.”
"I wanted someone who was older than 70, so there was a wisdom of experience, but who also had the capacity of fresh wonder, like a child. And also to be one of the greatest actors to ever do it. That list is not a long one."
Streep meets the age and prestige test. She does not meet the sex of the character Lewis wrote. Fox News Digital reached out to Gerwig’s agent, Creative Artists Agency CEO Bryan Lourd, and to Netflix. No fresh comment was reported.
The New York Post tracked the same storm when Deadline first reported Streep was in talks for the part. Fans objected that Aslan is “literally a male lion” and a Christ figure. One widely shared reaction said there was “no conceivable reason to cast a female as Aslan unless it is to deliberately subvert C.S. Lewis.” Reports also linked Charli XCX to talks for the White Witch and floated Daniel Craig for an unspecified role. Gerwig is lined up for two Narnia films, with an IMAX theatrical window before the Netflix drop.
Gerwig has said she wants to “embrace the paradox” in Lewis’s worlds. Paradox is not the same as flipping the central symbol of the story.
Casting storms of this kind now arrive on schedule, whether the fight is over a Narnia lion or the loud public rows that followed other star replacements, including cases where actors blasted sequel casting choices and demanded the original spirit stay intact.
“Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” is set for theaters on Feb. 12, 2027, and for Netflix on April 2, 2027. That calendar gives the studio time to smooth the controversy, or time for the boycott talk to harden.
Lott noted that men sometimes voice female cartoon parts for comedy, citing Brad Bird as Edna Mode in “The Incredibles.” Aslan is not a comic bit part. He is the moral and theological center of the series.
Lewis was a British scholar and Christian thinker. He built Narnia so children could feel the weight of sacrifice, authority, and resurrection without a sermon. Change the voice of the lion and you change the sermon.
Hollywood keeps testing how far it can stretch documents before the core audience walks. Some veterans say the old pressure campaign is finally losing steam, a point echoed when actors describe Hollywood’s ideological era giving way to plain audience taste.
Gerwig’s “Barbie” made her a brand-name director. Netflix handed her a cornerstone of Christian-friendly children’s literature anyway. The early returns from readers who grew up with the books are not applause. They are a petition and a warning about empty seats.
Studios can cast anyone they want. They cannot force families who know what Aslan stands for to pretend the swap is faithful. When the Christ-figure lion speaks with a new voice for no reason rooted in the text, audiences are right to ask who the movie is actually for.
