Netflix’s The Witcher franchise is having some trouble. There are a ton of rumors going around about why Henry Cavill has exited the series, including “unnamed sources” who say he was a toxic fanboy who sounded like Qanon. If you look closer at the allegations, it sounds a lot like he was fighting for the story to be accurate to the source, something he’s been complaining about since season 1. It makes sense that a writing team, who it has been reported, has no love for the source material, would see his defense of it as toxic. But why work on a show when you hate the material?
Anyways, the problems don’t stop there. Witcher: Blood Origins is out and the reviews have not been kind. It’s an easy defense for Netflix to say that it is being review-bombed by Cavill fans, and yes, that would explain the audience score of 10% (up from 8% yesterday). However, it doesn’t explain the critic’s score of 33% and a critic’s consensus that describes the series as:
A shallow excavation of ancient lore from Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy series, Blood Origin shares ancestral DNA with The Witcher but little of what makes the mothership series memorable.
All of this adds up to a crisis. There’s a lot of money invested in The Witcher. They hope to continue the series with Liam Hemsworth in the role of Geralt and they also hope to make plenty of other spin-offs based on the characters and lore of the novels and games from Andrzej Sapkowski.
In an attempt to stem the bleeding, showrunner Lauren Hissrich sat down with EW to promise that season 3 is worth watching.
“Henry has given so much to the show and so we want to honor that appropriately. What is so interesting is that Season 3, to me, is the closest thing that we’ve done as a one-to-one adaptation of the books.”
“Obviously, we can’t do every page, but Time of Contempt gave us so many big action events, plot points, defining character moments, huge reveals of a big bad. There’s so much to do that we were able to stick really, really closely with the books.”
“Geralt’s big turn is about giving up neutrality and doing anything that he has to do to get to Ciri. And to me, it’s the most heroic sendoff that we could have, even though it wasn’t written to be that. Geralt has a new mission in mind when we come back to him in Season 4. He’s a slightly different Geralt than we expected. Now, by the way, that’s an understatement.”
So, have you watched Witcher: Blood Origin? Are you planning on Watching Henry Cavill’s final season of The Witcher, or Liam Hemsworth’s season 4?