Henry Cavill says goodbye to the character of Geralt de Rivia this Thursday. The actor reported that he was leaving The Witcher in October and, as much as he was kind in his statement to show “enthusiasm to see” Liam Hemsworth (The Hunger Games) as his replacement in the skin of the witch, the truth is that the leaks they indicated that his departure had not been exactly friendly. The actor, a fan of Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels, had had enough of seeing the licenses of the screenwriter Lauren Schmidt Hissrich when adapting the literary material and, taking advantage of the fact that his contract with Netflix ended after the filming of the third season, he had chosen to emancipate himself of the project.
The fact that the platform was looking for a replacement allowed The Witcher to still be understood as one of the pillars of the catalogue: the content was not buried but rather a way to extend its presence and impact was sought, especially taking into account that it had projects in development at the same time. or directly pending premiere. But, looking at the performance of the franchise titles, Cavill’s departure seems symptomatic of a greater evil. Could The Witcher have become a dead weight in the Netflix catalog instead of that phenomenon that the platform wanted?
The consumption data, for the moment, are not necessarily disappointing. According to the platform, 15.2 million users were waiting for the return of Geralt de Rivia when the witcher returned with the first half of the third season at the end of June. They were 73 million hours watched for the first five episodes, a figure proportionally lower than the launch of the second season but which also did not indicate that The Witcher was in a direct crisis.
That yes, confirmed a reality. While television phenomena such as Game of Thrones or Stranger Things have shown growth season after season, both in terms of audiences and social discussion, The Witcher has a declining audience and difficulties to penetrate the serial conversation. And, let’s remember, the adaptation of Sapkowski’s novels had the objective of being a successor to Game of Thrones, squeezing above all the success of video games based on the books, with more than 75 million units sold, and a budget of 300 million for the first two seasons.
Could the episodes aired in June make less of an impact on culture and television, even with an active writers’ strike hindering the media’s chances of newsworthiness? HBO’s The Last of Us, which aired in January and February, served as an example of what a television phenomenon based on intellectual property linked to the world of videogames should be like: it gained huge audiences in the United States because it was an HBO release, it channeled the weekly conversation and ended up taking 24 Emmy nominations, where it is measured on an equal footing with Succession, The white lotus or La casa del dragón.
Netflix’s commitment to the universe of The Witcher, in addition, was forceful. On August 23, 2021, to calm the spirits of the fans who were waiting for the second season, the animated film The Wolf’s Nightmare was released. It told the origin of Vesemir, Geralt’s sorcerer mentor, and was set in the 12th century of this fantastic reality. And, after opening in the seventh position of the most viewed films on the platform with 13.3 million hours viewed, it disappeared without a trace from the audience list in its second week.
The witcher: The origin of blood, the miniseries released on Christmas Day 2022 and with Michelle Yeoh, by then still without an Oscar for Everything at once everywhere, fared better in the cast. His best data was in the second week, with 64 million hours watched, but in the fourth he had already disappeared from the list of the most watched series in English on the platform.
What is worse, that the story set 1,200 years before the events of The Witcher had mostly negative reviews or that its passage through the catalog aroused zero noise on social networks? Of course the latter. A non-low-cost franchise is not fed so that the titles go through the catalog without penalty or glory.
In addition to a fourth season with Liam Hemsworth, this summer it was discovered that there was a new spin-off of The Witcher already filmed: a series focused on the Rats, adolescent delinquents who, like Robin Hoods, steal from the rich to give it to the rich. poor, some characters introduced in the third season.
How can it be that it finished filming in July without yet having a title or without it being clear if it will be a movie or a miniseries? How does Netflix plan to approach its promotion if, unlike other titles in its catalog, it does not take advantage of its development and filming to arouse interest, especially when it comes to an a priori attractive intellectual property? It is also unknown what will happen to the children’s series announced in September 2021.
There is something of a dissociation between Netflix’s hyper-commercial proposal to turn The Witcher IP into a platform-defining franchise and the results it reaps among audiences and critics, with the flagship going under the radar before producing. not thirty episodes.
How long will it take Netflix to stop promoting this fictional universe, aware of its commercial limitations? Is the budget for these productions lower than what is assumed by professionals in the industry and, therefore, is it only produced as a hobby to retain lovers of the fantastic?
The main series may have its raison d’être, since it arouses considerable consumption, but the rest of the brand’s production seems dead weight, in the sense that it does not contribute significantly to the catalog and especially to Netflix’s obsession with producing new content to attract new subscribers. Why continue feeding a dead franchise that has not yet been able to find how to squeeze its literary potential on the screen?
