It was just a few years ago that it felt like Netflix couldn’t possibly churn out enough Witcher content to meet demand. Arriving just ahead of the fantasy drama’s second season, 2021’s Nightmare of the Wolf — an animated prequel focused on the exploits of Vesemir, the witcher who trained Geralt of Rivia — felt like an appetizer designed to satisfy the audience of 76 million viewers, or so Netflix claimed, who had devoured The Witcher’s first season and was eagerly awaiting season two. Showrunner Lauren Hissrich outlined an ambitious seven-season arc, with room for spinoffs, and star Henry Cavill said he was “absolutely” committed to seeing Geralt’s story to its end. It seemed, as I wrote at the time, that The Witcher was poised to expand its universe in any and every direction for as long as audiences kept streaming.
It was, in retrospect, a high point that Netflix’s expanded Witcher-verse seems unlikely to reach again. By one estimate, The Witcher has lost nearly half its viewers since season one, and Hissrich’s seven-season plan has been abridged to five. The spinoffs haven’t fared much better. An animated Witcher series aimed at children seems to have disappeared altogether. The live-action prequel The Witcher: Blood Origin barely made a splash despite featuring Michelle Yeoh in the middle of her Everything Everywhere All at Once Oscar run. Another possible spinoff — teased in The Witcher’s season-three finale and apparently partially filmed — now hangs in limbo. And the greatest challenge still lies ahead, as Liam Hemsworth takes over the role of Geralt from Henry Cavill, who departed The Witcher for its final two seasons under circumstances that remain murky.
Could any franchise weather this much chaos? The new animated movie, Sirens of the Deep, feels in many ways like an attempt to bring lapsed Witcher fans back into the fold. It’s an adaptation of a “A Little Sacrifice,” a well-liked short story from series creator Andrzej Sapkowski’s collection Sword of Destiny, which hews to a durable Witcher formula: Riff on a beloved fairytale — in this case, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” — but throw in Geralt to chop off some monster heads and say “hrm” a half-dozen times. And it slots neatly into The Witcher’s first and best season, with an ending that leads right into the events of “Rare Species.”
Most of all, there’s the actor cast to play the Witcher this time around: Doug Cockle, whose gravelly vocal performance as Geralt across the series’ video-game adaptations, including the beloved The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, have made him a fan favorite — so much so that even Cavill acknowledged his performance was inspired by Cockle’s work. It’s novel to hear Cockle voicing Geralt again, albeit a little jarring to hear him opposite Joey Bates and Anya Chalotra, who play Jaskier and Yennefer in the Netflix series, and not John Schwab and Denise Gough, who voice the same characters in the video game. It’s a reminder that Netflix’s Witcher, which roughly follows the arc of the books and not the video-game trilogy that serves as their sequel, is uneasily situated between the past and the future; with Henry Cavill gone and Liam Hemsworth yet to debut, Sirens of the Deep had few choices beyond mashing up the video game that predates the Netflix series with the TV supporting cast that’s still hanging around.
Sirens of the Deep accomplishes what it sets out to do, and it’s both the most confident and the most enjoyable Witcher story on Netflix in years. As Geralt and Jaskier journey to Jaskier’s hometown of Bremervoord, they get caught up in a cold war between a coastal kingdom of men and a seabound kingdom of merpeople, with the chaotic will-they-won’t-they relationship between a human princess and a mermaid princess threatening to rapidly heat things up. Men and monsters are beheaded; Geralt falls in with a new flame; and a villainous sea witch belts out a cheekily blatant riff on “Poor Unfortunate Souls” from Disney’s own take, The Little Mermaid. It’s a good time and a reminder that The Witcher can do this kind of standalone monster hunt very well. But as a one-off adventure rooted firmly in the narrative’s past, it’s not exactly a new course Netflix’s franchise can continue to chart.
What ails The Witcher right now goes deeper than Henry Cavill’s departure. Anya Chalotra, who plays Yennefer, has had the unenviable task of defending the plot deviations that have irritated a vocal chunk of the Witcher fandom. Freya Allen, who plays Ciri, confessed last year that — even as she prepared to shoot two more seasons of The Witcher — she felt “so kind of finished with it mentally.”
And that leads us back to the most puzzling of The Witcher’s hanging chads: a second spinoff, codenamed Riff Raff and created by Witcher writer Haily Hall, which was partially filmed but never formally announced. Initially planned for as many as eight episodes, the prequel series would have followed the Rats — a group of young thieves introduced, unpromisingly, as Ciri’s new companions in The Witcher’s season-three finale — as they executed what sounds like an Ocean’s Eleven–style heist in the Witcher universe. According to reliable fansite Redanian Intelligence, the reasons for the project’s disappearance is a simple but telling one: Netflix executives looked at the dailies and weren’t impressed. Per one report last year, the streamer does plan to salvage the footage shot by releasing it as The Rats: A Witcher Tale — yet another standalone Witcher story with no obvious path forward.
There’s a precedent for what might have gone wrong here. The Witcher: Blood Origin, the other prequel miniseries that, like season one of The Witcher, aimed to court a captive audience by debuting on Netflix during the all-important Christmas window. It was, by any metric, a disaster. Originally planned as a six-episode series, it was slashed down to four, with reshoots enlisting Minnie Driver as Seanchai, a shapeshifter whose main role was papering over the obvious holes in the story with exposition-laden voiceovers. We have not heard much about Seanchai since The Witcher: Blood Origin’s finale, and I don’t think we will.
But there’s an upside to relegating all those half-formed spinoffs to the dustbin of TV history: the clean slate it gives The Witcher going forward. (It helps that all of them are prequels, more concerned with filling out the franchise’s history and lore than pushing the story past where Sapkowki’s novels left it, as the video games did.) Whatever the specific circumstances of Cavill’s departure, it’s clear that there were fundamental differences between his approach and Hissrich’s. With Liam Hemsworth picking up the silver wig and swords, and with Laurence Fishburne joining the cast as fan-favorite character Regis, The Witcher has a second chance at a first impression. By all accounts, it’s one the show intends to have some fun with, playfully winking at the audience about the sudden change in the actor playing Geralt.
What’s also clear — whatever Netflix does next — is that there are plenty of Witcher stories worth telling. Last year, Polish video-game developer CD Projekt Red dropped a promising teaser for The Witcher 4. Andrzej Sapkowski’s latest Witcher novel, a prequel focused on the adventures of a teenaged Geralt, was published in Poland last December, and an English translation is expected by the end of the year. And a string of reliably entertaining comic books, including one that reimagines Geralt as a ronin in a land of monsters drawn from Japanese folklore, prove that there’s still plenty of room for more experiments with the basic building blocks of the Witcher universe.
Where does that leave Netflix? If there’s a single figure holding the streamer’s Witcher-verse together at this point, it’s not Geralt, or Yennefer, or even Ciri. It’s Jaskier, whose performance of the absurdly catchy earworm “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher” remains the Netflix series’ most significant contribution to the larger Witcher canon. The Witcher: Blood Origin’s reshoots included a beefed-up role for Jaskier, and Sirens of the Deep is, among other things, an origin story rooted in the bard’s difficult childhood. With apologies to The Witcher’s increasingly narrow focus on Ciri’s lineage and the doomsday prophecy it portends, this series was at its most enjoyable when it unfolded as a string of semi-standalone monster hunts. Maybe Jaskier has a few more of those in his pocket? As anyone who has followed The Witcher this far knows, he’s always good for a story.