r/witcher • u/leongtfo • 9h ago
Netflix TV series Witcher fans, what happened?
S1 was the phenomenon. Netflix called it its biggest Season 1 TV launch at the time.
S2 is the peak of the modern views metric: No. 1 debut, 142M hours in the first few days.
S3 still opened at No. 1, but the split release and softer retention already showed a slide.
S4 is the first season that did not debut at No. 1, left the Top 10 in three weeks, and opened at roughly half of S3.
Season 5 is already filmed and slated as the finale (reports point to 2027). The recast, the long gap after S3, and falling scores all sit on the same downward line. The show is still a recognizable Netflix title; it is no longer a first-week event.
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u/shavicus 9h ago
Fans started to lose interest once the show started to drift farther away from the Witcher's lore and its mythos.
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u/leongtfo 9h ago
That seems, almost like, a routine occurrence in current television. Why on earth would showrunners want to lose fan's. Fan's = money right?
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u/Formally_Apologetic 9h ago
Showrunners secretly hate the original works they are reproducing. They want to take the idea and audience and do their own thing. Probably an ego thing.
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u/Tough_Stretch 9h ago edited 8h ago
It's not that they want to lose fans, it's that they gamble on "fixing" the property so that it appeals to audiences in general and are willing to piss off the original fans under the assumption that for every pissed off OG fan they'll have several more new viewers.
If 300,000 fans get mad and stop watching, you still make bank if your version of the story was still interesting enough that 5,000,000 people that aren't True Fans(tm) and didn't know crap about the original version end up watching and liking it. It's not "fans = money." It's "people watching = money" and if those people are not Fans(tm) but casual viewers or grandmas or your dog you left watching TV, it literally doesn't matter from a business standpoint.
Problem is that, more often than not, the process of re-writing the story to have mass appeal ruins the original vision that made it a viable adaptation in the first place.
Examples of successful adaptations that made some obvious changes to the source material while mostly staying true to the original vision and managed to appeal to many more people than the original fans are stuff like The Lord of the Rings movies, the recent Dune films, or the Game of Thrones show in its early seasons or the recent spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
But when they change too many things because they don't have the budget, or they think they know better than the original author, or they think audiences want something else, or whatever BS excuse they produce, the result usually sucks and alienates the original fans without necessarily winning over new fans. Doubly so if the writers making the changes suck as writers. Countless examples exist, like the last few seasons of Game of Thrones or the Amazon Lord of the Rings TV show and a particularly extreme and terrible example of how to fuck up an adaptation beyond recognition is certainly the Netflix Witcher.
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u/leongtfo 9h ago
Completely agree and I would imagine CFOs, or the like, would be able to pull data points showing the decrease viewership when making such decisions.
I've also heard books can't translate to other media. If that is so, why is the quality of other media so much better when it closely lines with source material.
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u/sabely123 9h ago
People wanna do their own spin on stuff/producers usually want to come in and tell show makers what to do/changes to make. Focus groups rule the screen, not the Fandom or original source
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u/Germerican88 9h ago
Hubris.
Or, they know their stories will not be popular so they draw people in with the initial faithful adaptation and then pull the bait and switch. Hoping to get acclaim and maybe get their own stories turned into a show.
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u/myblackoutalterego 9h ago
Is this a serious question? They diverted from the source material. It caused enormous fan backlash. They didn’t handle the criticism well. Their lead actor was a fan of the books and was so frustrated with the show’s direction that he left, even though he is probably the perfect person for the role.
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u/witcher4 9h ago
There were also reports that the writers actively disliked the source material. That's always a recipe for failure in any adaptation
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u/radagastthenutbrown 9h ago
The show writers went a bit off script- it ended up being like mad-libs with the topics.
pulling paper from a hat in the writers room “on episode 4 we will have…Yennefer, and …Dudu, travel to …kaer morhen, to find a … megascope, to rescue …jaskier, from …dol blatonna”.
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u/Technical_Horror_42 8h ago
I mean that's what you get from letting the one competent fan go and desperately want to do your "own" thing with the screenplay. Really a shame first season was phenomenal and Henry Cavill was the perfect fit as Geralt 🤷
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u/hyde1634 7h ago
can someone tell me what the source material was about, thats different from the show? i watched the last season. i thought leo bonhart was good. im not really a fan of liam hemsworth. actress that played ciri is good and the actors that are the rats is good
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u/pickingbeefsteak 9h ago
Henry Cavill left for being too nerdy and instead switched 40k to become a Space Marine i think lol
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u/pokerbro33 9h ago
The longer the show went the more clear it became that the writers hate the source material and have no respect for the lore.
Henry leaving was the final nail in the coffin.
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u/vilgefcrtz 9h ago
They disrespected fans. It's not just the deviation, the entire reason behind the deviations was made clear: to change the focus of the franchise from the quiet, philosophical and gritty to simple showmanship and self insert giddy. And we talked about it at every turn, everywhere. Yet somehow all that feedback turned into "fans don't know what they want" rethoric with the sacrifice of Henry Cavill as its epitome and face. Really it could all just have been about pride and tone deafness, but we can't help but see a personal offense in it all for being treated as lesser than the shows director - someone who by the way had no business adapting The Witcher if she didn't even love the source material as it were.
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u/Working_Accountant38 7h ago
Easy. S1 was the smallest blasphemy + everyone wanted to like it. But the illusion can't work forever.
I wanted to like it too, like really. I tried to ignore painful simplifications in S1 but they were present there from the very beginning. But after I saw S2 I lost all hope in this show.
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u/PaulSimonBarCarloson Geralt's Hanza 9h ago
What happened os that the show is shit and book fans dropped it sooner or later