It’s hard to remember a series that has experienced such a spectacular debacle as that one The witcher. The adaptation of the saga, based on the epic fantasy books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski and popularized by the video game version, began in 2019 as one of Netflix’s pet projects. It was trying to be the equivalent of the platform game of Thronescreating a franchise with multiple derivatives. It’s the kind of thing Netflix has struggled to replicate ever since Stranger things. The witcher‘S The audience figures during the first season provided a glimmer of hope, but six years and five seasons later, the numbers have been lowered, the spinoffs have been canceled and the protagonist has been replaced.
Let’s start with the star of the show. It is true that there are many series that have introduced a new actor to play the same role. It happened with the role of Vivian Banks The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and with Daario inside game of Thrones. There were also cases where the protagonist left and another character came in, in particular House of Cards, Spin City, The Office, The ConnersAND Two and a half men. What is almost unprecedented is that a protagonist on whom much of a series’ success is based leaves and another actor comes in, as happened in the fourth season of The witcher. The show lost Henry Cavill, who had the right name to make the series appealing to audiences unfamiliar with the saga.
The change wasn’t just cosmetic: Cavill had been a promoter and fan of the franchise before the small-screen adaptation was released. So much so that he himself campaigned for the role of the sorcerer Geralt of Rivia. So when he announced his exit, loyal fans were quick to speculate that Cavill had left due to disagreements over how the original work and his character had been portrayed. Even so, the actor was diplomatic when it came to his 2022 Instagram post, wishing Liam Hemsworth, Chris’ younger brother, the best.
The fourth season begins by trying to gain new fans with a summary of the story of this monster hunter and the two women in his life. The recap allows the project to recreate some iconic moments from the past, but with its new star in place. The writers wanted viewers to be fascinated by the plots without having to have previously been involved in them The witcherthe complex world of this. And they wanted to avoid having to explain the change of actor, taking inspiration from Doctor Who series, which changed actors over five decades. The problem was that there were no new viewers.
As Netflix just announced, the eight-episode fourth season had 7.4 million viewers in its first four days, a drop of nearly 50% from season three’s 15.2 million. It didn’t even top the list of most watched premieres, coming in second after the romantic comedy Nobody wants itpublished a week earlier. But the decline isn’t just due to Hemsworth. Viewership had already dropped by half since the series began; handled 76 million in the first six months and became the platform’s most successful first season at the time, as well as having a musical hit with Toss a coin to your Witcher.
The witcher has yet to release the fifth season, which has already been filmed and will cover the books Baptism of fire, The Tower of the Swallow AND The Lady of the Lake. But the series that was presented as Netflix’s great hope didn’t die in a day; went into gradual decline due to an inability to convince both viewers who were familiar with the source material and those who were not. This simply proves that battalions of dragons and swords are not enough to recreate the success of game of Thronesas Amazon demonstrated with its The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Powerwhose audience decreases from season to season.
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