Led Zeppelin might be famously reluctant to licence their music to Hollywood, but Jimmy Page has made an exception for the new Narnia movie, and it’s a biggie: Stairway To Heaven.
The 1971 classic, which originally appeared on the band’s fourth album, has found a new home as the heavily remixed soundtrack to the trailer for Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, the Netflix adaptation of the first story in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles Of Narnia series, which hits the big screen in February.
Typically, a modern Hollywood trailer makes music sound galactic in scale, and this is no exception, with Robert Plant’s vocals isolated and drenched in reverb, and Jimmy Page’s iconic solo clattering in with more force than ever before.
“I had the privilege of meeting [film director] Greta Gerwig, a powerhouse in the world of cinema,” says Page. “She is a switched-on creative, as seen by way of Little Women, Lady Bird and Barbie, and the soon-to-be-released Narnia movie.
“I am thrilled that she chose Stairway To Heaven in the trailer for her film.”
According to a report in Variety, Gerwig wrote to Page and Plant to seek permission to use Stairway To Heaven in the movie, and showed them an early cut.
“It’s an epic song, and narratively, about a spiritual journey, a path of fake idols and wrong roads you can go down. It made sense to introduce the world,” says Gerwig. “I was so moved that they allowed me to use this song. They saw the heart and story of the film.”
Previously, requests to use Stairway To Heaven on Wayne’s World and Almost Famous were turned down by Led Zeppelin.
Meanwhile, recent movies to have benefitted from the band’s more relaxed attitude towards licensing include Argo (2012) and The Big Short (2015), which both used When The Levee Breaks, Thor: Ragnarok (Immigrant Song, 2017) and The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth (Black Dog, 2026).
(LouderSound)
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