Netflix Orders ‘The Witcher’ Prequel Series ‘The Witcher: Blood Origin’

In the wake of The Witcher’s impressive success on Netflix, the streaming service has announced that a one-off prequel series has been ordered. Aptly named The Witcher: Blood Origin, the six-part miniseries will take place over a thousand years before Geralt of Rivia’s exploits.

Netflix confirmed the news through their various social media platforms that their hottest new Original series, The Witcher is getting the prequel treatment.

We Got This Covered also reported a similar story a month ago, long before Netflix confirmed.

The series will be written by current showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, and Declan de Barra, whose previous work was on The CW’s Vampire Diaries spin-off The Originals, the Marvel/Netflix series Iron Fist and an episode of The Witcher.

The story of The Witcher: Blood Origin is set to take place 1200 years before the exploits of Geralt of Rivia.

1200 years before Geralt of Rivia, the worlds of monsters, men and elves merged into one, and the first Witcher came to be.

Announcing The Witcher: Blood Origin, a 6 part live-action The Witcher spin-off series from Declan de Barra and Lauren Schmidt Hissrich.

— NX (@NXOnNetflix) July 27, 2020

Who were the first Witchers?

The history of the Witchers is a tragic, bloodied, and torrid affair, but outside of the books written by Andrzej Sapkowski we have little information on the very first Witchers.

There has been material adapted from the Witcher universe that explores the origin story of Witcher kind, such as Wiedźmin: Gra Wyobraźni, a pen-and-paper imagination game published in the early 2000s.

Fans often debate whether or not these short stories and added material are cannon, but the author himself, Sapkowski, has explained how he feels about the adaptation of his work.

East is Easy and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Literature and video games are like East and West. There’s nothing wrong with adapting books into a different medium, but you can’t say that it’s all in the same boat. That it all started with a comic book, then came the TV show, then a film and then a book. And that all of it fits together. Bullshit.

So as for the first Witchers, we’ll be receiving our own origin story for the magical order, which will be written by Lauren S. Hissrich and Declan de Barra in due time.

New realms to explore

While the prequel explores the origin of The Witchers, it will also tell the story of how the world came to be.

In particular, we will see the Elves in their own realm before the arrival of humans and monsters in the event known as a ‘conjunction of the spheres’ which merged all of the respective realms together.

Declan de Barra will serve as showrunner on the series and had the following to say:

As a lifelong fan of fantasy, I am beyond excited to tell the story The Witcher: Blood Origin. A question has been burning in my mind ever since I first read The Witcher books, What was the Elven world really like before the cataclysmic arrival of the humans? I’ve always been fascinated by the rise and fall of civilizations, how science, discovery, and culture flourish right before that fall. How vast swathes of knowledge are lost forever in such a short time, often compounded by colonization and a rewriting of history. Leaving only fragments of a civilization’s true story behind. The Witcher: Blood Origin will tell the tale of the Elven civilization before its fall, and most importantly reveal the forgotten history of the very first Witcher.

Blood Origin will be the third Original of the franchise and will take place in the same universe as The Witcher and the upcoming animated feature The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf.

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