The first full trailer for The Witcher dropped in San Diego today, based off the excellent novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. Starring Henry Cavill in the lead role of Geralt, Netflix looks to have a potentially huge hit in the making.
The worst monsters are the ones we create.
It looks like Netflix is going all in here, and that’s great news. This is a story that deserved to be told well. The trailer, though packed full of content, still left a lot of mystery as to what exactly is going on. The Witcher show is based on the original novels rather than the very popular video game series. Since the game were so popular, this has some worried that fans might not be satisfied with the show, but that seems unlikely. Certainly, anyone who enjoyed the games should remain entertained if this can deliver anywhere near the quality of the source material.
Andrzej Sapkowski’s series consisted of eight books. The first two – The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny – were a collection of short stories that endeared fans to the characters. The rest of the books – Blood of Elves, Time of Contempt, Baptism of Fire, The Tower of the Swallow and The Lady of the Lake – were a continuing story arc. The most recent entry, 2013’s Season of Storms actually takes place before the previous five novels. Based on the trailer, it looks like a lot of the short story stuff could either be skipped or rolled into the timeline elsewhere.
In the trailer, we see Yennifer (Anya Chalotra), Ciri (Freya Allan) and Geralt’s best friend Dandelion (Joey Batey), who will go by the original name from the books; Jaskier. It’ll be curious to see how quickly the principle characters are brought together, seeing as it took quite some time in the original story.
The Witcher doesn’t have a premiere date yet, but is expected to begin streaming on Netflix in late 2019.