The Golden Compass

In a parallel universe, young Lyra Belacqua journeys to the far North to save her best friend and other kidnapped children from terrible experiments by a mysterious organization. The Golden Compass is a fantasy film based upon Northern Lights (titled The Golden Compass in the US), the first novel in Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials, and was released on December 5, 2007 by New Line Cinema. The story concerns Lyra, an orphan living in a fantastical parallel universe in which a dogmatic dictatorship, the Magisterium, threatens to dominate. When Lyra's friend is kidnapped, she travels to the far North in an attempt to rescue him. The project was announced in February 2002, following the success of other recent adaptations of fantasy epics, and at $150 million is expected to be one of New Line's biggest budget project ever after a series of box office disappointments in the past year.[2] In October 2007, the Catholic League called for a boycott of the film due to perceived anti-Catholic themes in the source novels.[3]