As far as merchandise goes i believe there are two main reasons why there is next to nothing available for this movie.
The first reason is that i believe Fox didn't want to run such a vast licensing and merchandising programme as Disney did on Prince Caspian. One of the reasons that was cited for Disney's departure in the Los Angeles Times article that came out shortly after, was that it was as much due to the failure of Prince Caspian to score big in the "additional revenue streams" as they are known, as it was to do with the boxoffice results. Merchandise is a big deal for a company like Disney - the only reason the Disney/Pixar film "Cars" (
the only Pixar film to attract any negative critical reaction) is getting a sequel is because the brand has been consistently amongst its top merchandise sellers despite the fact that its been several years since the movie came out, whilst other movies such as Wal-E, Ratatouille and Up which have all been big critical and commercial successes, but have all failed to take off in the merchandise arena in the same way that Cars did. Anyway, I'm not quite sure how the finances are handled in the world of brand licensing, and how much the Licensor (
Fox or Disney as it would of been) bears the cost when the merchandise fails to sell as anticipated, but evidently it was significant enough for Fox not to want to pursue the merchandising in the same way that Disney did.
This fact was cited when it emerged that the Video Game adaptation was cancelled - The game makers who had previously been in an arrangement with Disney Interactive had held talks with Fox about continuing the game with them, but Fox ultimately decided they did not wish to go in that direction. In fact, i believe there were quite a few merchandising deals for VDT in place before Disney left the franchise, but that once they left all the deals which had been previously agreed with Disney Consumer products fell through - PlayAlongToys for example were reported to be developing VDT toys back around the time of Prince Caspian, but it has recently been established that they no longer hold the license for Narnia and won't be producing any products for the upcoming movie.
However, in spite of all that i do know that Fox did try and attract new licensees to the franchise, as it was reported at several of the big licensing trade fairs that they were pushing hard to attract new vendors to the Narnia license, but evidently no-one seemed to pick it up. Which i believe is probably the second main reason why there is no Narnia merchandise at the moment - even with Fox wanting to keep things tighter and smaller scale, i think they ultimately failed to convince any merchadisers that the Narnia brand was one that was worth them investing in. Most of the companies out there probably saw how badly most of the Prince Caspian merchandise lines did and decided they weren't going to take a risk on a brand that they did not see any financial viability in, especially in the current economic climate. Part of me still can't believe there wasn't at least one company that was willing to take a gamble - it is afterall a major hollywood movie, and you would of thought loads of smaller firms would of bitten their own hand of just to be associated with it, but the evidence speaks for itself - there is pretty much nothing out there to buy at all.
That said, there are quite a lot of promotional freebies out there covering all sorts of different products - most of them are only available in competitions and offers and such, but no doubt most of it will make its way onto eBay in due course. I was thinking about making a list of all the different promotional items that are out there, but i'm kind of busy at the moment (
though not busy enough to stop me writing this massive long post evidently ) however, if you trawl through the "Advertising and Promotions" thread and the "Competitions and Sweepstakes" thread in the GMD Forum, you should be able to find most of them.