Nobody doubted until recently that ‘The Witcher’ was one of the great franchises of Netflixbut the announcement of the march of henry cavill as Geralt de Rivia after the third season of the series began to create doubts about his future. Now, ‘The Origin of Blood’ has increased the feeling that the future of the saga is less assured than it should be, since the other big question it generates is whether it has been a great disappointment or simply a failure.
An indisputable disappointment
We already knew that neither the critics nor the public had enjoyed this prequel too much, but we needed to have more data on how it had worked in audience, since until now we only had the certainty that it had achieved 15.87 million hours reproduced in its first day on the platform. A small number, but it was released on Christmas day.
The arrival of the audience data from December 26 to January 1 makes it clear that ‘The Witcher: The Origin of Blood’ is not going to redeem itself on this side either, since it added 64.52 million hours played, a very low figure for a series with such a high cost -It is estimated that each episode had a budget of between 7 and 10 million dollars-. And it is also that it has already disappeared from the Top of the most viewed in most countries.
It is true that some will argue that the data has to be lower with only 4 episodes, but the truth is that it is a rather poor result if we take this and other details into account. For now, ‘The origin of the blood’ was going to consist of 6 chapters, but during the post-production phase several cuts were made until it was left as it has come down to us. This leads to the fact that Netflix surely had to pay almost the cost of six episodes – some minimum amount would save on post-production issues – to then only have four.
Then we must take into account that ‘The Witcher: The Origin of Blood’ adds 80.39 million hours watched in 8 days. Let’s remember that the second season of ‘The Witcher’ debuted with 142.43 million in 3 days. There were 8 episodes, so there would be 71,215, slightly less than its prequel and in five days less. Bad signalhow recent we have the case of ‘1899’, which added 167.16 million in its first 10 days and Netflix has not hesitated to cancel it…
It must not be forgotten either that The second season of ‘The Witcher’ was already below the first in audiences. It was not an exaggerated drop -it went from 541.01 million hours played in 28 days of the first to 483.34 of the second in the same episode-, but it was not good news either, especially taking into account its high budget -at the time it was said that each episode had an approximate cost of 10 million dollars-.
Another bad sign was that the animated film ‘The Witcher: The Wolf’s Nightmare’ had an almost non-existent impact at its premiere -it was barely a week in the Top 10 and with a very poor 13.30 million hours reproduced-.
In this way, what should be one of Netflix’s star titles has shown clear signs of weakness, What will happen if ‘The Witcher’ season 3 also trades down? And it is not a hypothesis that must be despised, since all the signs point to a clear wear and tear of this universe. And I don’t think he’s going to doubt too much about Cavill’s departure either. Of course to have Liam Hemsworth instead of him it will be cheaper, but I don’t think it will compensate them for the change.
In Espinof: