About a month ago, Disney decided that they weren’t going to help Walden Media finance the third Chronicles of Narnia film, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader because fantasy films have been failing all over the board since Lord Of The Rings ended and Harry Potter got shuffled into the summer. Inkheart is probably going to do in the books as a failure in the latest blow to fantasy cinema.

Add onto that the relatively disappointing numbers for the second Narnia film, Prince Caspian and suddenly a third movie in an ongoing series looks a lot more like marching towards the cliff despite warnings.

On the other hand, Dawn Treader was my favorite Narnia book growing up and seeing it on screen could be pretty damn cool. I just wish that Walden Media found someone else to co-finance Narnia, since Fox has trouble treating projects with respect.

Though I guess they could use some of that Watchmen money…

From Variety:

Fox, which was entitled to first crack at “The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader” after Disney dropped out because of the shared Fox Walden marketing and distribution label, has made a commitment to develop the project. The two sides are still working out budget and script issues, but the hope is to shoot the film at the end of summer for a holiday 2010 release through the Fox Walden label.

It does make me feel a little better that Fox was contractually on deck when Disney dropped out, because it’s not Fox out there trolling for properties to ruin. But, knowing how 20th Century Fox runs its franchises, they might have just taken it on to suck the last of the money out of it, before depositing the franchise’s dead husk to the Fox video library.