The Witcher showrunner explains spinoff strategy

Netflix is going all in on its newest flagship franchise, The Witcher. Aside from the main series, which just released its second season, the streaming platform has already put out the anime prequel film Nightmare of the Wolf, has a live-action prequel series called Blood Origin coming out next year, and even a Witcher kid’s show in the works. These days, every company wants their own cinematic universe, and it’s pretty clear Netflix believe theirs will be The Witcher.

Which is fair, really. When The Witcher‘s first season dropped in 2019, it smashed all previous records to become Netflix’s most viewed show of all time up until that point. So it makes sense that the streamer decided it was a pretty safe basket to put some eggs in.

As all these spinoffs draw closer, we’re finally getting a bit more info about them. The latest comes from The Witcher showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, who has been making the press rounds to promote season 2. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hissrich outlined how all these new Witcher projects came about.

Why is The Witcher getting so many spinoffs?

“As soon as season one was a success, we started talking about how we might want to expand this universe,” Hissrich said. “I’ve had these ideas of spinoffs and other stories that we could do, because I knew that on the main Witcher — the mothership — we were gonna run out of room to engross ourselves in Sapkowski’s tales. Immediately I started thinking: how do we pair or spin off certain concepts, certain ideas, so that we don’t have to worry about covering them in exposition-y ways? We can actually blow them up and make them more dramatic.”

This explanation certainly makes sense with what we’ve seen so far. Nightmare of the Wolf introduced viewers to Geralt of Rivia’s mentor Vesemir and the witcher keep Kaer Morhen, both of which played a large role in season 2. Blood Origin will also introduce elements that will be crucial to the main Witcher tale down the line.

It hasn’t all been easy though. Hissrich detailed how the coronavirus pandemic nearly derailed the hopes for this expanded universe:

"I have to say, COVID kind of blew a hole in all of that because we had started thinking about expanding and then suddenly it was like, you know, we’re not gonna be able to premier The Witcher season two for another two years. And I had this deep concern that no one would care anymore. You know, how do we make sure that viewers want to come back? That after eight episodes, they’d be willing to wait 700 and something days, in order to see a second season. And just probably in the last two weeks, I’ve allowed myself to get excited about it again."

Thankfully, the fandom’s excitement wasn’t quenched. Whether you love The Witcher or hate it, there’s no denying the hype that surrounded the show’s return.

Hissrich and her team are already hard at work on season 3, which is set to begin production next year. “We’re done writing season three, which is exciting,” she said. “We will start production, God-willing, with the current state of the world, in 2022. And we’re just continuing rolling on, but the premier of this season, I think, has become really key to that and people’s excitement around it. That’s what is keeping me going forward right now.”

What is Blood Origin about?

While Henry Cavill and the rest of the posse is back at work making The Witcher season 3, we will get to watch Blood Origin, the first live-action Witcher spinoff. We got a teaser for the show after the end credits of The Witcher’s season 2 finale.

I’ll admit, when I heard that Netflix was doing this spinoff I had really mixed feelings. The first season of The Witcher was pretty shaky in places, so to drive full speed towards Spinoffs-ville felt like a crazy choice. Now that we’ve seen the second season of the mothership show and heard what Hissrich has to say about the spinoffs, however, the full picture is becoming clearer.

Blood Origin will be covering a major historical event in The Witcher history called the Conjunction of the Spheres. If you’ve seen the second season, I’m sure you caught at least one of the many mentions about this event. Despite the point of doing spinoffs being to introduce those events in a way that doesn’t require exposition, The Witcher season 2 had quite a bit of it.

The Conjunction was a moment 1,500 years prior to the series when several different worlds collided, stranding monsters and other humanoid races on different planets (or “spheres,” as the show is calling them). Before the conjunction, elves could freely travel between spheres; afterward, they lost this ability, resulting in a large portion of their people being stranded on the Continent. This is also how humans came to the Continent, their own homeworld having been destroyed before the Conjunction.

This event isn’t discussed in detail in the novels, but it’s important to the mythology. The Witcher is a multiverse story with quite a bit of world-hopping, as was hinted at in the second season. In later books, the idea of moving between worlds plays a major role. The riders of the Wild Hunt factor into that plotline in a big way, and since the show has already moved up their introduction, it’s pretty clear they’re trying to give fans a smoother introduction to this aspect of the story.

Blood Origin will be setting all that up, and giving us the first ever deep dive into the Conjunction of the Spheres. The big question is, will that series run for multiple seasons or be a one-off deal like Nightmare of the Wolf? And what other spinoffs does Netflix have waiting down the pike?

Blood Origin comes out in 2022. The second season of The Witcher is available now to stream on Netflix.

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