Netflix announces The Witcher season 3, a season 2 premiere date, and…a Witcher kids show?
Geralt, Ciri, and Yennefer are all back for another round of Netflix's flagship fantasy show, which returns on December 17
Aux News Witcher
It’s been a very good time to be a fan of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher series of fantasy novels over the last few years: Not only have Sapkowski’s books spawned one of the best role-playing video game franchises in recent memory, but they’ve been heartily embraced by Netflix, which has held up The Witcher as its flagship fantasy show.
Certainly, the series, and its upcoming Blood Origin prequel miniseries, have gotten pride of place at (ugh) Tudum, today, finishing out the Netflix fan event with fully four different video clips emphasizing different parts of Geralt, Yennerfer, and Ciri’s journey, as well as the wider Witcher-verse. And if you expect things in these clips to not be magical, bloody, and a little drunk, well: You probably haven’t tuned into The Witcher just yet.
Henry Cavill started by showing off two clips from The Witcher season 2 proper. The first features Geralt drinking with an old friend, who reminds him that, just because he and Ciri have finally met up after a season full of lots of “destiny” talk, he’s still going to have to keep her safe—including from the people who turned him into a witcher himself. In the second, we get reminded that Geralt’s heroism generally involves a lot of snarling at people and drinking weird potions, as he goes prowling for a monster who’s invaded the mansion he and Ciri are staying in.
Next up, we got a quick behind-the-scenes look at Blood Origin, making it clear that it’ll take place before the “Conjunction Of The Spheres,” the big world-altering event that brought all those monsters for witchers to witch against to the world. Finally, Netflix released a much longer and fuller trailer for The Witcher as a whole, stretching from the first season and well into the second.
The single most wild moment in the entire Witcher block of Tudum programming, though, came right before that trailer, when series showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich popped in to announce that The Witcher has been renewed for a third season, and a second anime film, and—and this is the wild one—a kids show. In the Witcher universe. That’ll be something.
The base Witcher series is showrun and executive produced by Schmidt Hissrich. The series stars Freya Allan, Anya Chalotra, Joey Batey, and Cavill as the White Wolf himself, Geralt of Rivia.
23 Comments
I’m so happy they’re adapting A Grain of Truth and they better end like the story does……Abandon all hope of not getting spoilers ye who enter here!…..They better damn well have the reveal the Beauty to Nivellen’s Beast is a goddamn vampire.
My guess is they do a flashback adapting the short story he is introduced in.
Hey, so I figure you’ve read all the books? I read the two books of short stories and absolutely loved them (The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny) and then I read Blood of Elves and it was a slog. Should I keep going? Do they pick up after that one?
Yeah I’ve only read up to Blood of Elves as well so I can’t really help you.
Is this Dalton Wilcox, poet laureate of the west?
I remember enjoying the first season, though I also remember thinking that if this was Netflix’s attempt at its own Game of Thrones, it was an amusing miss. Not sure how a kids’ show is supposed to work in this universe without feeling entirely like it’s in a different one.
Kind of reminds me when Games Workshop published kids novels set in Warhammer 40k.By the way, fuck Games Workshop and their draconian and unenforceable policies against fan content!
I look forward to more performative outrage about the show being impossible to follow.
But it was! Not just all the timey-wimey stuff but the world building was generally awful. I had no idea who was what and who all the bad guys were and why.
Sorry for thinking a TV show called ‘The Witcher’ about a witcher would bother to explain what a witcher was.The show was impossible to understand unless you already had experience with the books/games.
That sure is a broad generalization. I’m living proof that that is not true for everybody: I had no knowledge of The Witcher whatsoever, beyond knowing it was a video-game (I didn’t even know at the time it was initially a book), and I folowed with no problem. And to me, the timey-wimey stuff made it even more interesting.
I know it’s subjective, some pple prefer clear, immediate explanations, others prefer to infer from context. Just bc smthg doesn’t do story-telling the way we like, doesn’t mean it’s “impossible to follow”.
I’m fine with slowly doling out the world building details. It was the whole “telling a story with two timelines but relying on the viewer to figure out what happens when by tossing them a handful of easy-to-miss context clues and throwaway lines” thing that really annoyed me.
I… thought it was fine? Though I did play about 10 hours of Witcher 3.
I watched it that week it came out in 2019 and had no idea what was going on. But I thought that was because I was super baked all week.
people are basic. they need “explainers” for everything now, as if explaining every last artistic choice lead to art being better.
What was “performative” about it? In your mind, everyone found the show super easy to follow, but pretended it wasn’t for…status reasons, I guess? Like, there was a huge “The Witcher is hard to follow” bandwagon that everyone was raring to hop aboard because all the cool kids were doing it? That is a legitimate thought that you had?
Lots of proud media illiterates in this thread. Oof.
I’m all in. For all of that, and more. Bring it! Hell, even the show for kids. (That one might play while I make lunch or something, but, sure, I’ll watch all of it.)
will this season be slightly coherent? and no, I don’t mean the timelines.heneeeeefur looopezzzzzz!
Sounds like a lot of eggs they’re putting in this Witcher basket, which, although it was kind of fun, had a ridiculous first season.
Glad they’re doing another animated film. The Nightmare of the Wolf was fantastic, especially the fight scenes.
Nothing I see here is making feel that season 2 is going to be better than season 1.
Yikes.
I guess the kids show version of the Witcher makes some sense since Andrzej Sapkowski started out writing these things as “deconstructions of iconic fairy tales” many of which will be familiar to a kids audience. The ones he actually committed to the page may not be appropriate (there’s a *lot* of sex in his Beauty and the Beast take) the spirit of this sort of thing can work.