Led Zeppelin Finally Licensed “Stairway To Heaven” For A Movie

It's not easy to license a Led Zeppelin song, and it's especially not easy to license "Stairway To Heaven," the Led Zeppelin IV epic that stands as a monument to awesome classic rock excess. There are at least a couple of examples of big movies that really, really wanted to use "Stairway" for soundtrack purposes but couldn't because Zeppelin wouldn't allow it. Finally, however, Zeppelin have finally gotten an offer that they couldn't refuse, or at least one that they didn't refuse. A remixed version of "Stairway To Heaven" soundtracks the trailer for Narnia: The Magician's Nephew, director Greta Gerwig's Netflix-funded follow-up to her 2023 blockbuster Barbie.

We don't yet know whether "Stairway To Heaven" appears in the actual Narnia movie, but even getting it into the trailer is a coup. There's a famous scene in Wayne's World where Mike Myers' Wayne Campbell, encountering his dream guitar in a music store, plays the first four notes of "Stairway" before a clerk stops him and points to a sign that says "NO STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN." As Consequence Of Sound points out, you only heard that little snippet if you saw Wayne's World in the theater in 1992. By the time the film hit home video, they'd taken out that audio and replaced it with few generic notes.

Cameron Crowe also wanted to use "Stairway To Heaven" in his semi-autobiographical 2000 teen-rock-writer opus Almost Famous. He filmed a scene where Patrick Fugit's William, trying to convince his mother to let him follow the band Stillwater on the road for a Rolling Stone feature, plays "Stairway" for his mother, played by Frances McDormand, attempting to use it to explain why music means so much to him. But the scene was deleted after Led Zeppelin refused to grant the rights. They also denied "Stairway" requests from TV shows like Stranger Things and The Simpsons.

Apparently, there's a scene in the second season of the Amazon series Outer Range where Tamara Podemski and Kimberly Norris Guerrero recite the "Stairway" lyrics to each other, but maybe that doesn't count. Beyond that, the Zeppelin IMDB page lists a few presumably-unauthorized "Stairway" usages and the time they performed it in their own 1976 concert film The Song Remains The Same.

The Narnia trailer hit the internet on Tuesday. The same day, Greta Gerwig started the film's promotional rollout, appearing with Stephen Colbert at the Lincoln Square IMAX theater in New York. Gerwig had already described the film's aesthetic by saying, "I wanted a rock opera." (It's not a musical; that's just the vibe.) As Gold Derby reports, Gerwig told Colbert about getting Robert Plant and Jimmy Page to approve her use of "Stairway To Heaven": "It's an epic song that's about a spiritual journey. That's also the story of this movie. I showed [the film] and talked to them about it, and they both love C.S. Lewis. The whole thing was very fortuitous."

Of course, that Netflix money might've had something to so with their decision, too. At this point, if feels a little meta when the music drops out and Plant quavers, "She's buying a stairway to heaven."

Narnia: The Magician's Nephew comes to theaters next year, opening 2/12. Its cast includes people like Daniel Craig, Carey Mulligan, Emma Mackey, and Ciarán Hinds, as well as Meryl Streep as the voice of the mystical lion Aslan. I really like all of Gerwig's past directorial efforts, and I hope it's good, but the level of CGI goo in the trailer has me a little nervous.