The Witcher: everything you need to know about Netflix’s fantasy epic

Let’s just get this out of the way: Liam Hemsworth actually makes for a pretty solid Geralt of Rivia. Hemsworth assumes the mantle in the fourth season of Netflix’s The Witcher, picking up from Henry Cavill. And while it can be distracting at first, especially since Cavill inhabited the role so well, it only took a few episodes before I was mostly on board with the new face under the blonde wig. He still knows how to wield a sword, and he still answers most questions with a cranky “fuck.” The problem isn’t that the show has a new lead actor; it’s that it continues to be a bloated mess, and season 4 doesn’t do anything to fix that.

In case you’ve forgotten — I certainly had — despite getting off to a promising start, in season 3 Cavill’s Geralt literally limped across the finish line as the show set about once again separating its three main characters. At the outset of the new season, a bruised and bloodied Geralt is leading a ragtag group, including his old friend Jaskier (Joey Batey), on a quest to find and rescue his surrogate daughter Ciri (Freya Allan). Ciri, meanwhile, was magically whisked away to a far-off desert, and she’s now living in secret with a band of fun-loving thieves, while a false version of her sits on a throne that Geralt is heading toward. Meanwhile, Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) is leading her own group, trying to rally support among her fellow mages for a showdown with the show’s current big bad, a supremely powerful wizard named Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu).

It’s been a few years since Netflix confirmed that Liam Hemsworth would be taking over as Geralt of Rivia in the live-action Witcher series. And while we caught a brief glimpse of him in action last year, the first proper clip from season 4 of the show reveals just how Hemsworth will be inhabiting the role — including his take on Geralt’s signature growling voice.

In addition to giving us a better look at Geralt, Netflix also confirmed that The Witcher’s newest season is coming out pretty soon: it will start streaming on October 30th. The show’s end is in sight, as Netflix previously confirmed that it will conclude with season 5. Here’s the official setup for the next season:

The Witcher is in a period of transition right now. While the live-action TV series is shifting to a new lead actor in the role of Geralt as it approaches its finale, the next game will switch things up even more, with Ciri as the protagonist. These are huge changes for the fantasy franchise. And before they happen, we have The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep, an animated film that isn’t burdened with any of that. Instead, it’s a classic Witcher tale: monster hunting with equal parts action, humor, and tragedy.

Based on the short story “A Little Sacrifice,” Sirens of the Deep has Geralt (voiced by Doug Cockle, reprising the role from the games) and his bard pal Jaskier (Joey Batey) together in a seaside kingdom. At the outset, Geralt’s un-witcher-like sense of morality has them strapped for money after he refuses to kill a monster because it didn’t actually do anything wrong. So the pair make a deal: each will take on the next job that comes their way, no matter what it is. For Jaskier, it’s simple enough, as he ends up performing at a local festival. Geralt’s job is a lot more complicated: investigating a murder in hopes of preventing a war.

A new actor, but the same white wig. We already knew that Liam Hemsworth was taking over as Geralt of Rivia in Netflix’s adaptation of The Witcher, replacing Henry Cavill. But now we have our first (official, anyway) look at the actor in the role, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly. And he looks like, well, Liam Hemsworth with Geralt’s iconic white hair. It’s not clear if the shift between actors will be referenced in the show itself, but this early image makes it seem like the transition might be relatively seamless.

Here’s how he looks in motion:

We still don’t know what Liam Hemsworth will look (or sound) like when he takes up the role of Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher. But we do know how long he’ll be wearing the white wig: Netflix has confirmed that the show’s fifth season will be its last.

The news comes as Netflix has confirmed that it has started production on season 4 of The Witcher — the first that won’t feature Henry Cavill in the lead role — and that it and season 5 will be filmed back to back. The two upcoming seasons will “complete the adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s books,” according to Netflix. That means they will cover a trio of Witcher books: Baptism of Fire, The Tower of the Swallow, and Lady of the Lake.

Season 4 of The Witcher may be far off on the horizon, but there’s still plenty more of Geralt of Rivia in store on Netflix. At its Geeked Week event today, the streamer announced The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep, an animated movie that takes place right in the middle of season 1 of the live-action show and is based on the short story A Little Sacrifice. Doug Cockle, the voice actor from The Witcher 3 video game, will be reprising the role of Geralt.

Here’s the official description:

In the finale of The Witcher’s third season — which also happens to be the final episode where Henry Cavill will play the lead role — our hero, Geralt of Rivia, spends most of his time in bed. This is not an exaggeration: after getting his ass thoroughly kicked in a previous episode, he’s stuck recuperating in a forest, trying his best to get healthy so he can continue his quest. It’s a bizarre choice that sidelines Geralt in what should, in theory, be an important moment for the series, the character, and the actor. Instead of sending Cavill out on a high note, the season just kind of... ends.

It didn’t have to be this way. When it debuted way back in 2019, Netflix’s adaption of The Witcher proved to be a surprisingly faithful version of the story, one that was dark and funny at the same time. Things got off track in season 2 when the show moved away from both the source material and its main cast of characters, putting much more focus on political squabbling and worldbuilding than the main trio of Geralt (Cavill), Ciri (Freya Allan), and Yenn (Anya Chalotra).

We’re approaching the end of an era for Netflix’s adaptation of The Witcher. When the final episodes of season 3 drop on July 27th, it will mark the conclusion of Henry Cavill’s run as Geralt of Rivia, with Liam Hemsworth taking over the role for subsequent seasons.

In a new trailer, Netflix shows what fans can expect in those last episodes — and it looks like a big, bloody war. At one point, Geralt’s sword shatters in battle, suggesting his new big bad enemy is a tough one, and the trailer ends with him saying, “There’s no coming back from this.” Now that’s ominous.

As The Witcher has grown beyond its first season and expanded with not only multiple seasons but prequels, too, the team behind its visual design has had to expand its ambitions as well. In particular, it’s had to think a lot about the history of the world and how it influenced the way things like fashion and architecture evolved on the Continent. That could be as simple as the material utilized to make swords in one time period or as large as a ruin in the main timeline that was once a beautiful structure in the past.

For Andrew Laws, a production and concept designer on the series, all of those details are vital for making The Witcher universe feel like a real, lived-in place. “A lot of the time, you don’t get to see all of [the details],” he explains. “But I think it has an effect on the eventual outcome of the final product.”

We’ve only had two seasons of The Witcher on Netflix, but the show has already had somewhat of an identity crisis. It started off with a bang, with a big, bloody debut that showed exactly why the books and games before it were so beloved. It was dark yet funny, full of action, sexual tension, and all kinds of cool monsters — plus an excellent Henry Cavill as the gruff and lovable Geralt of Rivia. Season 2, meanwhile, lost some of that personality as it attempted to tell a more grand — and typical — fantasy story while also deviating significantly from the books. Things got even more off-track with the prequel Blood Origin.

Now we have season 3, which is being split into two volumes and which will mark the end of Cavill’s run as Geralt (the show will continue with Liam Hemsworth in the lead role). The first volume doesn’t exactly get away from the epic story the show is trying to tell — there are still warring factions and magical forces and questions about the nature of the world itself — but it returns most of the focus where it belongs: on the main cast of Geralt, Ciri, and Yennefer. More importantly, the show is fun again, where the big narrative beats don’t get in the way of all the blood and jokes.

A trend seems to be brewing over at Netflix. After popularizing the binge-watch concept by releasing all episodes of a show at once, lately, the company has been experimenting with different ways of dropping series. The League of Legends spinoff Arcane, for instance, was turned into a three-week-long event, while Stranger Things 4 was split into two when it debuted last May.

Now we have The Witcher season 3: volume one will premiere this week, on June 29th, while the second will hit in July.

The Witcher is a juggernaut, and thanks to new data from The Witcher game developer CD Projekt Red (CDPR), we have a better idea of just how huge it really is. The studio revealed Monday that The Witcher video games have sold more than 75 million copies, with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt alone responsible for more than 50 million of those sales.

Those sorts of numbers mean that series is one of the biggest video game franchises of all time. For comparison, this new data puts The Witcher 3 in spitting distance of smash hits like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Red Dead Redemption 2, which have both sold more than 53 million copies, and both of those are among the top-selling games ever.

While fans await season 3 of The Witcher, Netflix already has its eyes on season 5. In an interview with Deadline, Sophie Holland, the show’s casting director, explained, “We’re just about to start filming on season four with Liam Hemsworth and there will be a short gap then we go straight into season five.”

The third season of the fantasy show will kick off on June 29th — but only the first half. Much like Stranger Things 4, Netflix is splitting The Witcher season 3 into two volumes, the second of which will premiere in July. From there, things get interesting. Starting with season 4, Hemsworth will take over the lead role of Geralt from mainstay Henry Cavill, who is moving on to other projects. Clearly, Netflix has a good amount of faith in Hemsworth as the White Wolf.

Season 3 of The Witcher finally has a premiere date. Netflix announced that the fantasy series will return in June, though not all episodes will be available at once.

Similar to how Stranger Things 4 was split in two halves, The Witcher’s third season will be released in two batches: episodes 1-5 will start streaming on June 29th, while 6-8 will be available on July 27th. The third season was previously pegged for a summer 2023 timeframe. We also got a first look at the season via a brief minute-long teaser trailer.

There’s one very important thing missing from The Witcher: Blood Origin: Geralt of Rivia. Of course, it makes sense that the iconic character isn’t in the new four-episode prequel series, given that it takes place more than 1,000 years before he was born, at a time when witchers (and the monsters they love to hunt) don’t even exist. But that doesn’t make his absence felt any less. Because without the lovably gruff Geralt, or at least an equivalent character to keep the story grounded, there isn’t all that much to differentiate The Witcher from all of the other epic fantasy series out there, of which there is no shortage this year in particular. Blood Origin does explain some pivotal moments in the franchise’s history, outlining the key moments that shaped the Continent, as it’s known. The problem is that it’s just not that much fun to watch.

The show takes place 1,200 years before the events of the original Witcher series, at a time when elves are the dominant force in the world. They don’t have much competition. While dwarves share the land, neither humans nor monsters do, and so elves — who are scarce in Geralt’s time — are spread across multiple kingdoms and clans, each with their own customs and beliefs and many of whom war amongst each other. That is until a few ambitious elves set a plan in place to unite everyone (by force) under a supreme leader. This sets off a chain reaction that leads to all kinds of pivotal events in Witcher lore, including the creation of the monster hunters and an event called the “conjunction of the spheres,” in which the worlds of elves, humans, and monsters are forced together, creating the Continent as we know it.

Netflix’s first full trailer for The Witcher: Blood Origin shines a spotlight on the prequel’s key characters played by Michelle Yeoh, Sophia Brown, and Laurence O’Fuarain. But it also comes with a bit of a surprise at the very end, revealing the return of Joey Batey’s Jaskier.

The bard’s return doesn’t make all that much sense yet, as the series takes place 1,200 years before The Witcher, but it might have something to do with the massive monoliths included in the trailer that are “causing tears between worlds.” Towards the end of the trailer, Jaskier’s lute appears, while Minnie Driver’s Seanchai, a character described by Netflix as a “shapeshifting collector of old lore with the abilities to travel between time and worlds” asks a disheveled-looking Jaskier to “sing a story back to life.”

When Netflix announced during last year’s Tudum that a third season of The Witcher was already on the way, there was some hope that maybe, just maybe Henry Cavill’s Geralt of Rivia would be back on our screens slaying demons in time for the upcoming holiday season. Unfortunately, that’s not going to be the case, and there’s going to be a bit of a wait, but not an especially long one.

While there was no new footage from The Witcher’s third season shown at this year’s Tudum presentation, Cavill and co-stars Anya Chalotra, and Freya Allan a made brief appearances to share some teaser art and to announce that the series will return in 2023.

While the third season of Netflix’s live-action Witcher series still doesn’t have an actual premiere date, the wait for Declan de Barra and Lauren Schmidt Hissrich’s upcoming The Witcher: Blood Origin prequel series is almost over.

Netflix’s The Witcher: Blood Origin hits Netflix on December 25th. And while we didn’t get a new trailer for the series — which tells the story of the very first witcher, long before Geralt’s iconic adventures — we did learn that Minnie Driver will be joining the cast, where she’ll star alongside the likes of Michelle Yeoh.

There’s more to The Witcher universe than just Geralt, and Netflix gave the first glimpse at that with an early look at Blood Origin. The trailer was initially revealed as a post-credits scene in The Witcher season 2, which debuted on December 17th.

The upcoming live-action prequel stars Michelle Yeoh as a sword elf, and it takes place well before the main series, covering the events that led to the creation of witchers in the first place. Netflix describes the series as an “epic prequel series depicting the creation of the prototype witcher and the events leading to the pivotal ‘Conjunction of the Spheres.’” (For more on the conjunction, check out this interview on the scientific possibilities of the multiverse.) The show is slated to debut on Netflix sometime in 2022.

Those who plan on watching the second season of Netflix’s The Witcher can look forward to plenty of epic monster battles, character development, and Henry Cavill staring broodingly into the middle distance. But season 2 also reveals a lot about the broader world that The Witcher takes place in — or more accurately, the many worlds.

Specifically, this darker and more serious chapter in the epic fantasy saga zooms in on a seminal event in the Witcher lore known as the conjunction of the spheres. During the conjunction, which took place approximately 1,500 years before the events of the show, a bunch of different spheres of reality collided with one another, causing elves, dwarves, humans, and monsters to all get mixed up together on the same continent, much to their mutual discontent.

The first season of Netflix’s live-action adaptation of The Witcher was a careful balancing act. In some ways, it was the service’s answer to Game of Thrones, a bloody fantasy epic with a story that spanned a continent (and many years). But, in keeping with the source material, it was also a lot of fun. There were creepy monsters to hunt each episode, some great comic relief in the form of an annoying bard, as well as steamy bath scenes and a full-on orgy. It had everything.

Season 2 attempts to up the fantasy stakes by focusing on some of the bigger, more existential questions about The Witcher universe, from the origins of monsters to why a young princess’s screams create earthquakes. The result is a show that has a more ambitious, epic feel and one that also loses some of the personality that made it such a hit in the first place. These issues mirror the trajectory of the books, but they feel more pronounced in a live-action series where so much depends on the characters and their performances.

If there’s one thing that ties the many iterations of The Witcher together — whether it’s the original books, the hit games, or more recently the live-action show — it’s Geralt of Rivia. The lovably miserable monster hunter is the core of the series in a way that’s rare for fantasy, which often follows stories bigger than just one person. But that’s also what makes Nightmare of the Wolf, an anime spinoff on Netflix, so interesting. It’s a prequel that shifts back in time to focus on Geralt’s mentor Vesemir, who can feel like the polar opposite of his protege: charming, playful, and with a voracious appetite for the finer things in life.

It’s a refreshing twist that also does a good job of exploring some of the mysteries at the heart of The Witcher universe, without getting away from the hallmarks of the series. Nightmare of the Wolf might not be the most welcoming starting point for the franchise, but it’s a whole lot of fun.

Netflix has dropped the latest teaser trailer for its animated Witcher prequel, giving us a better look at the film’s characters and allowing us to hear its English-language voice actors for the first time.

The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf focuses on the early life of Geralt’s mentor, Vesemir, “a cocky young witcher who delights in slaying monsters for coin,” as per Netflix’s synopsis. Available plot details are thin, but the film involves Vesemir confronting “a strange new monster” and “demons of his past” in a politically-fraught kingdom. (So far, so Witcher.)