It’s hard to remember a series that has experienced such a spectacular debacle of fame and relevance The witcher. The adaptation of the saga, based on the epic fantasy books by the Polish Andrzej Sapkowski and made popular by the video game version, began in 2019 as one of Netflix’s big bets, which was trying to find a new game of Thrones and create with it a franchise with multiple derivatives. One of those that the platform has difficulty building beyond Stranger things. The audience of the first season gave hope, but, six years later, the series resembles those that appear only by scraping the bottom of the algorithm’s plate. The development of its five seasons has resulted in a sharp decline in its opinions, the cancellation of the same spin off and even the change of face of its protagonist.
Let’s start with the last one. It is true that there are many series in which an actor has been replaced to play the same character. It happened with Aunt Viv The Fresh Prince of Bel-AirInés in Tell me or Daario in game of Thrones. There have also been cases where the protagonist left and another character took the lead role: House of cardsSpin City, The Office, The Conners, Two and a half men…What is almost unprecedented is that a protagonist on whom much of the success and promotion of a series is based leaves and his own character is inherited by another (although there are exceptions such as Spartacusdue to the illness of its main actor). This is the challenge of the fourth season of The witcher after losing Henry Cavill, who, although poisonous to the film’s box office, had a name to make the series attractive to audiences outside the saga.
But this change was not just aesthetic: the star, who left Superman in secret, was a promoter and fan of the franchise even before the launch of the television adaptation. So much so that he himself campaigned for the role of the tough witch Gerald of Rivia. Therefore, when he announced his departure, loyal fans were quick to speculate that Cavill had fled due to disagreements over how the original work and his silent character would be adapted. Despite this, the interpreter was politically correct in his announcement on Instagram in 2022. In it he sent encouragement to anyone called upon to wear the white wig, Liam Hemsworth, Chris’ younger brother and much cheaper actor.
The fourth season, in fact, begins from scratch, trying to win over new followers with a summary, narrated by a narrator, of the story of this monster hunter and the two women in his life. This gives the project the space to recreate some iconic moments from the past, but now without its former star, who has been replaced by a face much less known to the general public and also less charismatic. The writers had the goal that the most curious spectator could become passionate about the plots without having previously visited this complicated world of creatures and time jumps that was never easy to follow. They also did not want to explain the change or link it to conspiracies, as they have been able to do for five decades. Doctor Whobut rather something more harmless. The problem is that the new visor was no longer there.
As Netflix announced this week, the eight-episode fourth season garnered 7.4 million viewers in its first four days of broadcast, a drop of nearly 50% from the 15.2 million season three achieved. It couldn’t even top the most-watched charts upon its premiere, and was second behind the romantic comedy Nobody wants itpublished a week earlier. But the decline isn’t solely attributable to Hemsworth. Viewers had already halved since the franchise’s inception, when it reached 76 million viewers in its first six months and became the most successful first season on the platform at the time, as well as surpassing the screen and creating a musical hit with the sonata. Throw the coins at the witcher.
TO The witcher It has yet to close a fifth season which has already been filmed and will continue the books Baptism of Fire, The Tower of Swallows AND The lady of the lake. But this series that was presented as Netflix’s great hope did not die in a day, but rather after a gradual decline whose curse failed to convince neither viewers who knew the original material nor the curious. Maybe we had to learn that dragons and swords are not enough to find the new game of Thronesas Amazon also verified with its The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, whose audience decreases from season to season.
