Picture: Netflix
Just a few days ago, Netflix officially announced that The Witcher would be ending after Season 5, with Season 4 just starting production. The two final seasons will be filmed back-to-back, which was already known before.
One of Netflix’s endeavors with The Witcher franchise was to expand it with spinoffs. First was the very well-received The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf anime about Vesemir. Then we had The Witcher: Blood Origin live-action miniseries, which was not so well received, to put it mildly, despite putting in a pretty good shift when it comes to viewership numbers.
Later this year will be The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep starring Doug Cockle as Geralt, who reprises his role from the CD Projekt Red games.
But there were two more spinoffs: The Rats and the untitled kid’s Witcher series. Both, we’ve been told by sources, are dead in the water Netflix and shelved for good.
What happened to The Rats?
Picture: Aggy K. Adams/Instagram
The Rats was a prequel series about its eponymous characters, the Rats. They are a group of teenagers who turned to crime because of the war. The Witcher introduced them in the final episode of Season 3. In that season, we saw them as a whole group. The prequel would explore how they met and what they did before meeting Ciri.
The cast of The Rats included Ben Radcliffe (Giselher), Christelle Elwin (Mistle), Fabian McCallum (Kayleigh), Aggy K. Adams (Iskra), Juliette Alexandra (Reef), Connor Crawford (Asse) as well as Dolph Lundgren (Brehen), Deoudone van der Merwe (Juniper), Morgan Santo (Dulcie), Stevel Marc (Lord Ridot) and more.
Although Netflix never acknowledged the existence of The Rats prequel, its filming already happened in 2023. They filmed for two months with The Sandman and Shadow & Bone director Mairzee Almas in South Africa and went into post-production right after.
But all is not well with The Rats.
Redanian Intelligence reported earlier this week that they only filmed a small portion of the originally intended full limited series. Upon seeing the footage, Netflix decided not to pick The Rats up for an entire season nor repurpose it into a movie.
It gets even more interesting as Netflix reportedly intends to repurpose some of the footage from The Rats into flashbacks in The Witcher Season 4. Whether they end up doing it remains to be seen.
The kids animated Witcher spin-off is also dead
RI also reports that Sirens of the Deep anime is the final Witcher spinoff on Netflix. That means that the untitled kids series announced in 2021 is dead as well. We’ll likely never know what it was meant to be—perhaps normal Witcher, but bloodless and tame, or maybe Witcher-themed Cocomelon. We’ll never know.
The Witcher on Netflix is ending in the coming years, far from the sprawling fantasy universe envisioned just a few years ago.
Despite these cancellations, there’s still at least something to look forward to. The Witcher Season 4 is now in production, and Season 5 is being written to be filmed right after Season 4 wraps.
We reached out to two Netflix representatives tied to The Witcher earlier this week, but they did not respond to our requests for comments.
Stay tuned for more The Witcher news coming up in the coming weeks as production gets underway!