Petitions, hashtags, and social media campaigns very rarely yield tangible results for anything not named Warrior Nun, but it’s become very clear that those who decried The Witcher for daring to carry on with a Geralt of Rivia played by anyone other than Henry Cavill are making good on their collective promise to shun the Netflix series.
While a review-bombing was par for the course and entirely expected – with all eight of the show’s worst-rated episodes on IMDb comprising those from season 3 – viewers appear to be turning their backs on the Continent in their numbers based on the latest data. While it does admittedly come from a third party and not Netflix’s weekly measurements, it’s enlightening nonetheless.
According to SambaTV – an analytics firm that measures how many households equipped with its technology check out any given streaming exclusive – the second volume of The Witcher‘s third season accrued 574,000 streams in its first four days of availability.
By comparison, the first six days of Volume 1 were watched by upwards of 1.1 million households, with the extra 48 hours doing little to paint a rosier picture. By comparison, even the terrible Blood Origin notched 1.3 million views in its first eight days, and those are numbers The Witcher can’t even hope to replicate.
For a more direct comparison, Stranger Things 4, Outer Banks season 3, Bridgerton season 2, Extraction 2, and The Gray Man all notched somewhere between 1.6 million and 3.5 million households in their first four days, indicating just how badly The Witcher has dropped off in the face of the unending backlash.