Led Zeppelin Let Greta Gerwig License 'Stairway to Heaven' for Narnia
Netflix debuted the first trailer for Greta Gerwig's Narnia: The Magician's Nephew this week, and it arrived with a needle drop audiences noticed right away: "Stairway to Heaven." According to Deadline, Gerwig recently explained how she persuaded Led Zeppelin to license the song for her adaptation of C.S. Lewis's prequel book.
The permission is the real event here. Trailers can rent almost any song, but a band of Led Zeppelin's stature agreeing to lend that particular track to a fantasy adaptation is the part Deadline treats as the story, and it is a stranger fact than the trailer itself.
Still, the choice is doing work beyond novelty. A song that canonical buys instant grandeur — it tells you the film intends to be mythic rather than twee, which is roughly the register the Narnia books trade in. Whether that counts as craft or as an expensive shortcut around earning the same feeling on screen is a fair argument to have.
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Trailer needle drops now do the job the first two minutes of a film used to do: they set the register. "Stairway to Heaven" over Narnia promises scale, and a promise is cheaper than a demonstration.
The song is not the surprising part — the surprise is that the band said yes at all. Gerwig having to explain how she got the licence suggests that permission, not taste, was the hard problem.