In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a full-blown mutiny going on in The Witcher fandom, with supporters of the massively popular Netflix fantasy series ready to give up on the Continent altogether after the seismic recent developments surrounding the fourth season.
Were the platform to announce the adventures of Geralt of Rivia were drawing to a close after the third run of episodes as Henry Cavill moved onto pastures new, then people would be seriously upset, but they’d get over it eventually. However, revealing that Liam Hemsworth would be stepping in to inherit the mantle, which was then swiftly followed by rumors of creative disagreements between the former leading man and the creative team, has created a firestorm of backlash and negativity.
There’s been calls for The Witcher to be canned altogether, while the petition demanding the entire team of writers and showrunners get fired so Cavill can return has rocketed to almost 150,000 signatures in a week. It’s clear which side the fans have fallen on, something that’s been made even more transparent by a Reddit thread calling out showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich for telling blatant lies about the direction of the show.
Additional scuttlebutt (some of which came from former writing team member Beau DeMayo) offered that many of the higher-ups on The Witcher actively despise the source material, and are trying to veer as far away from it as possible. As the story goes, that didn’t set too well with the notoriously invested Cavill, who may have actually quit the gig as an act of defiance.
It’s getting messier by the day, then, and Netflix has put itself in a position that’s beginning to look increasingly unwinnable as a result.