Henry Cavill recently had less-than-super news for fans of his Netflix fantasy series, The Witcher. “My journey as Geralt of Rivia has been filled with both monsters and adventures,” the actor wrote on social media. “Alas, I will be laying down my medallion and my swords for Season 4”.
Witcher watchers were uniformly distraught. Not only was Cavill walking away from the part of iconic monster hunter Geralt. Adding to the insult was the news that the character was to be instead portrayed by shrieking charisma vacuum Liam Hemsworth. It’s like unveiling Matt Hancock as the new James Bond.
There are even mutterings Netflix might go so far as to pull the plug on The Witcher following the airing of Cavill’s swan song next year. Either way, it is worth asking whether Netflix has tossed overboard one of its biggest opportunities at creating another Stranger Things mega-franchise. If so, how could this have possibly come to pass? Is it even possible to muck up a surefire hit like The Witcher? Netflix has found a way.
To be fair to Cavill he has a lot on his platter. He’s just teamed up once again with Millie Bobby Brown for another Enola Holmes film. Plus, there is the trivial news that he is to reprise the part of obscure comic book lunk, Superman. Even with superpowers, it has the makings of a packed diary.
Still, of all his projects, The Witcher was the one for which Cavill is known to have a special attachment. Since the moment he was unveiled as small-screen Geralt in 2018, he hasn’t stopped banging on about his love for the novels by Andrzej Sapkowski and the even more successful Witcher video games. He had, he revealed, actively campaigned for the gig. So why walk now? Because of Superman? It sounds like a load of kryptonite.
One theory is that Cavill’s leave-taking was spurred not by a brimming schedule – but by his dissatisfaction over the direction of The Witcher and its ever-more conspicuous departures from the source material. In the short term, fans will have a chance to take the temperature of the series when a spin-off, The Witcher: Blood Origins, debuts on Christmas Day. In the longer term, who can say what the future holds for Geralt?
That Witcher show-runner Lauren Hissrich had her own ideas about the character will have been made clear to the fanbase across the previous two seasons. There’s also the recent revelation that some in her writers’ room were openly disdainful of the books – never a promising starting point for an adaptation.
That bombshell was dropped in October by Beau DeMayo, a former writer on The Witcher.
“I’ve been on show [sic] – namely Witcher – where some of the writers were not [fans] or actively disliked the books and games (even actively mocking the source material),” DeMayo said in an Instagram Q&A. “It’s a recipe for disaster and bad morale. Fandom as a litmus test checks egos and makes all the long nights worth it. You have to respect the work before you’re allowed to add to its legacy.”
That Cavill and Hissrich/Netflix were coming to the project from clashing perspectives had already been hinted at by the actor. Promoting series one, he revealed that he’d had to push to bring to the screen the “true” Geralt.
“The toughest part for me was finding that balance between the showrunners' vision and my love for the books,” he said in 2020. “All of my asks and requests were along the lines of just being faithful to the source material.”
But now it’s a case of man-bun overboard. And it is reasonable to ask if The Witcher can soldier on without him, given how thoroughly he embodied Geralt – a gruff monster hunter and one of the last of an order of professional beast-slayers.
Cavill not only brought a dangerous edge to the eponymous lead character – he was by far the best thing about the show. It was his growly charisma that kept the series driving on, despite its often clunking dialogue and confusing plots. With Geralt swinging his sword, those flaws faded somewhat. Without him, The Witcher is like Luke Skywalker without his lightsaber or Gandalf without his pointy hat – what’s the point?
The extent to which Cavill carried years one and two of the Witcher is hard to overstate. Steeped in the lore of the novels and games, he did more than portray Geralt; he illuminated every aspect of the character – the monster-mashing, the dark wit, the hidden cuddliness.
For fans, everything else about the show has been a travesty. Season one suffered from the bizarre decision by Hissrich (formerly of The West Wing and Daredevil) to tell the story over a trio of confusing timelines. Even those versed in the source material were baffled as we tracked Geralt, his future lover Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) and princess Ciri (Freya Allan) across the decades (without necessarily knowing they were trapped in separate timelines).
The three-way split was frustrating and chaotic – and yet also somehow deathly dull, despite Cavill’s success in inhabiting Geralt. Chalotra and Allan did their best as Yennefer and Ciri. Alas, the nuances of the books and games were steamrolled.
For instance, the ambivalence we feel in the games towards the all-conquering Nilfgaard Empire is swatted away. Nilfgaard is instead depicted simply as a force of implacable evil – rather than a complicated nation with lots of moving parts.
Allan was, to her credit, perfect as Geralt’s ward Ciri. However, there were concerns that Chalotra, in her early 20s, was too fresh-faced to portray Yennefer. In the books and games, she is far closer in age to the veteran Geralt. Somehow the show had stumbled into the cliche of pairing older actors with far younger co-stars.
Fantasy is notoriously tricky to transfer to another medium. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings got it right – and Game of Thrones half right, those triumphant early seasons giving way to an underwhelming conclusion.
But the Witcher should have been the simplest of them all to adapt. It’s built around an appealing anti-hero. And the world is a glorious hodgepodge drawing on Polish-born Sapkowski’s passion for Central European mythology. A warrior, a rotating cast of monsters, a “Grimdark” backdrop. Could it be any easier?
We know it can be done because it’s already been pulled off successfully. The video games are, by consensus, even better than the novels. Most notably, 2015’s, Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt places Geralt in the middle of a sprawling tale of warring kingdoms, arcane magic and strong female characters. There is also a scene in which he battles a giant zombie foetus – so it ticks the body-horror box, too.
Netflix could have done with The Witcher becoming a mega-smash. Faced with the double whammy of a weaponised Disney + (Star Wars, Marvel) and a cash-splashing Amazon (The Rings of Power), the streamer is crying out for a second blockbuster brand to go alongside Stranger Things.
That isn’t to suggest The Witcher hasn’t done well. Seasons one and two ranked among Netflix’s top 10 most popular shows during their month of release. But it could be so much more.
Hissrich has made no secret about wanting to use The Witcher to celebrate diversity, arguing that it is possible to be true to the Central European origins of the stories while honouring modern, US-style multiculturalism. The cast is drawn from a variety of backgrounds.
“It was important to keep that same tone in our show,” she said. “With that in mind, I asked around, especially to Polish friends: can the Slavic culture be reduced solely down to skin colour? The answer was resounding: ‘God, we hope not’.”
Television that champions diversity often draws out the worst in its fanbase. Yet that isn’t why The Witcher is in danger of imploding. Watching, it was obvious from the outset that Cavill as Geralt was the only one who truly cared for the character and the universe. Everything else was a taped-together mélange that betrayed indifference, at best, towards Sapkowski’s world-building.
The convoluted timeline appeared to have been inspired by HBO snooze-fest Westworld (which likewise sought to trip up viewers by zinging back and forth across the decades). Trite sex scenes were an attempt to tap into the Game of Thrones fanbase. The good v evil storylines, meanwhile, owed more to the simplistic writings of CS Lewis than to The Witcher’s grey-on-grey moral landscape.
Now, with Cavill out the door, an unsatisfying mess now threatens to blow up in Netflix’s face. And what could have been a magical saga is instead seemingly doomed to become yet another cautionary tale in how not to adapt a beloved franchise.
The Witcher is on Netflix now
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