Recently I was watching a roundtable discussion in which one of the participants tried to explain why he preferred the LOTR movies to the Narnia movies. It's an interesting question.
By way of disclaimer, it's been several years since I saw the movies, and decades since I read the fiction, so my recollections may be fuzzy, but here's how I'd answer the question:
1. One reason I think LOTR translates more easily into film is its travelogue quality. That naturally invites a cinematic adaptation.
The Middle Earth landscape is more down-to-earth than some of the Narnia books (e.g. Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Magician's Nephew).
2. In addition, the LOTR movies had a bigger budget and better director. By the same token, they were filmed in New Zealand, to take advantage of the fabulous landscape. So the movies have a more wide-open feel to them.
By contrast, the world of the Narnia movies felt more cramped and artificial–like they were mostly filmed in studios or made more extensive use of CGI. Mind you, if they had a bigger budget, as well as a director who excels at simulated worlds (e.g. James Cameron, George Lucas), that wouldn't be an impediment.
3. Lewis generally uses characters as mouthpieces for his philosophical and theological musings. So they're apt to be one-dimensional, with stilted dialogue. Compared to so many other novelists, Lewis is aloof when it comes to characterization.
Lucy is an exception, but that's because she was inspired by a real girl Lewis was very fond of (June Flewett). The daughter he never had. Lucy comes alive in the way other characters don't because it has a real template, and Lewis found her delightful. Another exception is Digory, but that's because Lewis put a lot of himself into that character, from is own troubled upbringing.
By contrast, Tolkien didn't have nearly as many interesting ideas as Lewis, which makes the characters and their interaction more natural and realistic. Compared to many other gifted novelists, Lewis is rather weak on dialogue and characterization. Where he comes into his element and excels most other novelists is in the realm of ideas and the evocative, otherworldly settings. When it comes to fictional settings, he's more like Ray Bradbury and Cordwainer-Smith–although the latter is better at dialogue and characterization than Lewis.
4. Lewis has far higher peaks than Tolkien. Some of his fiction moves on a transcendent plane (Perelandra; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Magician's Nephew) that Tolkien can't match. Indeed, Tolkien doesn't even aspire to such heights, and that would lie beyond his reach if he tried. Lewis uses his fiction to illustrate his sense of sehnsucht, and he has both the imagination and expressive prose to succeed.
That's more challenging to capture on film, without the distinctive and descriptive voice of Lewis as narrator. It would take a bigger budget and a more talented, imaginative director than Michael Apted to emulate that quality.
5. Finally, the film version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader isn't long enough to do justice to the narrative. It needs to linger more and savor the atmospherics.
to translate the observations into more axiomatic terms, Tolkien was better at world-building and characterization in ways that lend themselves more readily to cinema. For my personal preferences Lewis was the better literary stylist and accomplished storyteller but in terms of the aforementioned genre elements, Tolkien's work is stronger. It also highlights that compared to many post-Tolkien and even post-Lewis fantasy writers a lot of failures come with inconsistent world-building. When plot twists and character arcs depend on the rules of the road for world-building you need to be careful to keep them all. That is, in a nutshell, one of the key failures of the Abrams era Star Wars reboot, people writing for "the moment" at the expense of the half-dozen films that came before. The panentheistic Pelagianism of Lucas' original trilogy was compromised by the Greek tragedy prequels and the reveal in The Last Jedi that Rey was basically forced by the Force to have a ton of power. The only way to fix that would be if, say, a Sith were forcing Rey's latent force sensitivity to happen. Since I haven't bothered to see Rise of Skywalker yet I don't know if that's the direction they went but since the prequels Lucas set up a world-building double bind in which the original trilogy predicated force use on a panentheistic Pelagian faith and the prequels anchored it all to midichlorian counts. In the battle between the mechanics of chosen one Force destiny and unfettered free will the Star Wars franchise has been at the mercy of agendas that can be wildly inattentive to the world-building Lucas set up in the earlier films.
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