Season 3 of The Witcher has arrived on Netflix. Well, it’s half-arrived. Well, it’s actually 5/8ths arrived thanks to Netflix’s baffling new desire to split all its popular shows into two disjointed pieces that release a month apart.
The first five episodes are quite good, better than season 2 I’d argue, and of course, who is the best part of these episodes? Henry Cavill’s Geralt. While I do like the quadrangle of him, Yen, Ciri and Jaskier, it’s Cavill’s Geralt that has always anchored this series.
It is wild that Netflix, the showrunner and writers were not able to keep him on board. Henry Cavill is the biggest nerd in Hollywood, and was over the moon to be playing the role, having practically memorized every book and taking inspiration for his Geralt from the games. He said he’d stay with the series for as long as it stayed true to the source material, and yet…here we are.
It was announced well ahead of this season that Cavill would be leaving after season 3, and his replacement was soon announced, Liam Hemsworth. No not Thor. No not the one in Westworld. The other one. Hunger Games. No one really has anything against Liam Hemsworth at baseline, but the recasting is wildly unpopular due to losing Cavill alone.
We have never gotten an illuminating official statement for why Henry Cavill left The Witcher. All the behind the scenes chatter seems to indicate that as the show has gone on, he’s become more and more involved, even rewriting scenes, because they weren’t being faithful enough to the source material. One alleged incident involved the writers playing off the death of his horse, Roach, comedically, but Cavill rewrote it into the final, poignant scene that aired.
It’s hard to even find something to compare this to other than perhaps…DC landing Henry Cavill for Superman and promptly making 1.25 good movies with him and squandering him for the better part of a decade before replacing him in a new era. But even that makes more sense as DC totally switches gears. Cavill leaving in the middle of the series when no one else at all is being recast is not the same thing, nor is it similar to James Bond, Doctor Who or Peter Parker, like an executive producer just tried to say. Not even close.
This should have been able to work, especially if the show’s greatest sin was straying too far from the source material for its giant lore nerd star to want to leave. Sure, there may be other issues in play that we don’t know about, but The Witcher was one of the only series that at its inception, felt like maybe it could get into Game of Thrones territory. Now, that’s a fantasy, and I know many fans who will just quit the show outright after Cavill leaves, even though two more Hemsworth seasons have already been greenlit. Poor guy.
I’ll keep watching. The other performances from the cast are worth showing up for, and I don’t think it’s far to just ditch them all entirely as they will no doubt do their best to finish the original books. But man, the Cavill thing is baffling, and one of the biggest TV fumbles I can remember ever seeing.
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