Netflix Casts Its 'Witcher'

With HBO's Game of Thrones heading out on its farewell tour next year, there is going to be a chasm-like gap for epic adult fantasy in TV land. Though Amazon is spending all the money on its Lord of the Rings show, it will be most likely be more PG rated than the much more adult orientated Thrones.

Netflix has now stepped into the adult themed epic fantasy genre with The Witcher, based upon Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy franchise and more well known for its series of video game adaptations.

I'm personally still playing The Witcher 3 years after its original release as it's such a deep and nuanced sandbox world that demands repeat play throughs. I had never heard of the books till after I played the games however upon reading the first short story collection by Sapkowski I was immediately hooked. Having played the game meant you knew exactly what the towns, taverns and monsters looked like, you knew the world and you knew the characters.

A Tavern in 'The Witcher 3'

In essence The Witcher was ripe for the screen.

There had been previous incarnations of the show with The Hexer back in 2001 and a following TV show in Poland, however these were poorly received and didn't do justice to the characters and material. Fans are now hopeful that on Netflix the epic fantasy world Sapkowski has created will finally be realised.

Lauren Schmidt will be the show runner and executive producer and while not a common name yet she does have some good experience on her CV. She began as a staff writer on The West Wing so learning at the altar of Sorkin is a pretty good start. More recently she has been a producer and writer for Marvel on Daredevil & The Defenders.

She has already stated that the first season will only be eight episodes which after the filler episodes of some of Netflix's Marvel shows can only be a good thing. I think the fans would rather have eight solid, hour long mini movies than 13+ episodes where the characters are filling in time as there is no budget for those stories.

So with a network and a show runner we just needed a Gerald. Enter self confessed Witcher fanboy Henry Cavill (Superman), now I've not been a fan of Cavills in the DC Universe but then many of the characters and movies have been poorly written.

However after a fantastic turn in the Mission Impossible: Fallout Cavill won me over, proof that a good script and director could use his talents well.

Meet Gerald of Rivia.

A great choice for the lead and hopefully a role that will define Cavill more than the DC universe movies, plus with the games and abundant material of The Witcher universe we could have found our new show to replace Game of Thrones.

Some fans expectations were tempered from some leaked scripts that hit the internet recently, however Schmidt soon explained that because of the way spoilers leak these days the scenes were written purely for the casting process and would not contain any plot points from the actual scripts.

These 'leaks' also revealed a number of the main characters we can expect to see in the show such as Yennifer, Ciri, Roach, Triss Merigold, Cahir etc. The games have such a large expansive list of characters that there will be no shortage of interesting plot and characters going forward.

However don't expect The Witcher until late next year at best, possibly even 2020.