Netflix still reportedly developing The Witcher seasons 4 and 5 together

The past six months have been pretty weird for fans of Netflix’s The Witcher. First there was the bombshell announcement that Henry Cavill is leaving the series after season 3, to be replaced by Liam Hemsworth starting in season 4. Then there was the release of The Witcher: Blood Origin spinoff, which got panned pretty much across the board by critics and audiences alike. Have the negative reactions to Cavill’s departure and Blood Origin doomed this franchise?

According to reliable scoop site Redanian Intelligence, the answer is no. Last September, the site’s sources claimed that Netflix was planning to develop seasons 4 and 5 of The Witcher concurrently; this was before the news of Cavill’s departure and replacement. Now, they’ve tapped their inside sources once more to confirm that Netflix is still planning to produce seasons 4 and 5 together. Moreover, RI claims that those plans were only laid after Hemsworth got involved in the show. Writing on these two concurrent seasons is expected to take around half of 2023.

Will The Witcher season 5 be the end?

This sounds like something a studio would do as they work towards an ending for a series, which begs the question: will season 5 be the end of The Witcher?

If we take a step back and look at The Witcher book series by Andrzej Sapkowski, that seems like a very real possibility. Season 3 is set to adapt The Time of Contempt, one of the more beloved novels in the saga. It will also include some elements from the following book, Baptism of Fire, which we know because the character of Milva (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’ Meng’er Zhang) has been cast.

Provided that season 3 doesn’t go too deep into Baptism of Fire, that would mean that seasons 4 and 5 would adapt three books between them: Baptism of Fire, The Tower of Swallows and The Lady of the Lake. That sounds like a lot, but those books have a few very meandering plotlines as well as chronologies that sometimes overlap, so they could effectively be compressed. (Or Netflix will just make up its own story like in season 2.)

Either way, we’ve still got plenty of Witcher coming at us. The Witcher season 3 is set to premiere this summer. After that, Netflix reportedly has another spinoff in development about The Rats, a gang of teenage bandits we’ll meet in season 3.

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