Just a few short hours before the trailer for Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” went live on Tuesday afternoon, I watched it in a theater with Gerwig herself, who premiered it to an audience at the AMC Lincoln Square in New York, paired with a Q&A between her and Stephen Colbert.

The film is the first adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, the sixth book published in the Narnia series, but chronologically the first. Even prior to a trailer, the film had established a drama: People were concerned that Gerwig, what with her direction of feminist-forward films like “Barbie” (2023), “Little Women” (2019) and “Lady Bird” (2017), was preparing to scribble her pink pen somewhere it didn’t belong.

Those embers were stoked, predictably, when it was confirmed that Meryl Streep would be lending her voice to the character of Aslan, a lion designed to portray Jesus throughout the Narnia series. (The entire Narnia series is, by design, an imaginative retelling of the Christian story from Creation to a Last Judgment.)

The doors opened to the AMC theater at 8:45 a.m. on Tuesday morning, and those 300-400 of us in attendance were treated to passed hors d’oeuvres like mini ricotta pancakes and colorful cocktails like dragonfruit bellinis in the lobby outside the screening room. 

In such a setting, it is possible to believe that everyone is quite friendly or perhaps just on the verge of introducing themselves. It is only when you notice their stares catching a second too long that you realize they are trying to figure out who you are, or, rather, if you are somebody.

As far as I could tell, none of us in the room on Tuesday morning were somebodies, the somebodies being kept away in some elusive side room of the theater, presumably to prevent them from being torn limb from limb by us, a wild mob of media piranhas, influencers, Netflix suits and everyone else who had a schedule flexible enough to permit their attendance—and did not find a premiere for a preview designed to stoke excitement for the eventual premiere of a film to be an event refracted too many times through the looking glass to sacrifice a morning’s worth of time. 

I befriended a librarian with purple lipstick, who had received an invite through this-or-that partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library.

The trailer was promising. It did not offer the first notes of Meryl Streep voicing Aslan, cutting to the title slide just before her character sings Narnia into existence, but it did include the first licensed use of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” in a film—a strong choice, if a literal one, that pairs well with the prismatic rock-odyssey Gerwig seems to be building to. 

But you don’t need me to tell you all of that—the trailer was published to YouTube just a few hours later. 

The real reward for us early risers, us V.I.P. few, was Gerwig and Colbert’s Q&A. But because this Tuesday morning premiere of a trailer was exclusive, we had to lock our phones away in pouches, along with any other laptops, tablets, cameras, smart glasses and recording devices. I cannot offer any exact quotes.

This makes for a tepid dispatch: The only things I could report on were self-reported or unreportable. On top of all this, I really feel I must remind you that what we are orbiting here is not a film but a trailer.

I will share instead the details I recall and those I jotted down as I stepped out into the mid-morning glare afterward, because I would like to show that an exclusive Tuesday morning premiere of a trailer is not an event too far behind the curtain, too glamorously foreign, for the likes of you and me. 

I can tell you that Greta Gerwig presents earnestly, even shakily, as she debuts her work before a crowd. I can tell you that she talked at length about her lifelong immersion in the works of Lewis, compulsively reading and re-reading the Narnia series as a child and discovering his essays and apologetics as an adult. When it came to addressing the Christian theology on which Narnia is based, I can tell you that she offered only some agreeably theistic musings on its importance, but that I found her earnest and ardent enough about the work that I didn’t much mind.

I can tell you that Stephen Colbert is still charming, and that when Gerwig thanked him for being there on that Tuesday morning, he replied, “I don’t have a job right now.”

I can tell you that I sat next to a pastor with a Rolex watch who brought his teenage daughter and, through luck or meticulous event management, was seated directly behind a couple he knew. I can tell you they enjoyed pleasant conversations about, among other things, their respective churches, the speed at which children grow into adults and the perks of moving to Garden City.

The comic futility of a premiere for a trailer of a movie on a sunny Tuesday morning is perhaps most revealing of the discourse surrounding Gerwig’s adaptation of Narnia, because I am here to tell you that you missed nothing on Tuesday morning. 

Trailers are always hyper-potent distillations of a project, good for a brief head rush. A supplemental interview for a movie is always, even when compelling, a dispensable framing device. As far as trailers and interviews go, I am here to tell you these were good ones, but I’m skeptical how much that ought to influence you.

I plan to see “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” when it comes out in February, but should my generous hosts read this article, I suspect I will be buying my own ticket to see it, which is just as well.

Will Martino is a Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., fellow at America Media.