Netflix’s The Witcher prequel miniseries debuts on Christmas Day

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The Witcher: Blood Origin, a live action prequel four-part miniseries, will premiere on Netflix on 25th December 2022.

The Witcher: Blood Origin stars Michelle Yeoh, Sophia Brown and Laurence O’Fuarain, taking us back some 1200 years before the time of Geralt, Yennefer and Ciri, to when elves ruled the world.

Per the blurb on the trailer, “The Witcher: Blood Origin will tell a tale lost to history: the creation of the first prototype Witcher, and the events that led to the pivotal Conjunction of the Spheres, when the worlds of monsters, men, and elves merged to become one.”

The miniseries will help tide eager fans of the Netflix series over until Season 3 can resume Geralt’s story in 2023. The first two seasons were both released in December and dominated a lot of holiday downtime as people binged them both – Blood Origin will get to go up against the King’s first Christmas message in the UK. Season 3 only wrapped filming in September 2022, so could be a spring or summertime release.

That will be the last time that we see Henry Cavill as Geralt, with the announcement that he will be stepping away from the role after Season 3, with Liam Hemsworth taking up the mantle in his stead. While the public statements from the two make it sound like an agreeable handover, there’s plenty of speculation about what’s going on behind the scenes. Cavill is known not to have been particularly happy with the direction taken in Season 2, and with his return DC universe to play Superman, the showrunners might simply not have wanted to accommodate his schedule. At the same time, they reportedly considered Hemsworth as a frontrunner for the role in the first place, before settling on Cavill.

The Netflix series really sparked a fresh interest in The Witcher, building on and amplifying the popularity of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Since then CD Projekt Red has announced a wealth of The Witcher games are now in development, including the start of a brand new trilogy and a full remake of the original game.

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