After The Witcher rose quickly to popularity when it was released in 2019, ideas for new spin-off shows quickly began to pop up all over the place. Nightmare of the Wolf, an animated movie following the story of a young Vesemir, was one such project. Netflix couldn’t help but make documentary-style productions like The Making of Season 2, The Witcher Bestiaries, and one option, which is just an hour-long recording of a Witcher-style fireplace. There is even talk of making another anime movie after the success of Nightmare of the Wolf. As fans love to love The Witcher, it was no surprise when Netflix announced The Witcher: Blood Origin.
This new live-action spin-off is coming out sometime this year and focuses on how witchers were first created. But the showrunner for The Witcher, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, made a point of saying how “surprised” fans will be by this new series. In fact, while talking with TechRadar, she said, “it can’t just be another branch of our medieval fantasy.” So it seems the goal is for this spin-off to spin way off from the original series. Although it remains in the genre of “prequel” and will dictate how The Witcher’s world came to be, the story will be far detached from Geralt and his troubles and will be very much an original narrative crafted by Declan De Barra.
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So What Will It Look Like?
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The Witcher: Blood Origin will take place about 1,200 years before the original series and will occur around the time of the Conjunction of the Spheres, a cataclysmic event that brought humans and monsters into a world where elves had been, as far as we know, living peacefully. When the Conjunction happened, humans began to colonize the Continent and elves, attempting to avoid war, fled East, believing that at some point, these new conquerors would stop expanding. This led to a series of progressively more violent conflicts, which established the poor relationship we see between humans and elves in Geralt’s time. And with monsters now intruding on this world, there was a great need for those who would hunt the beasts and protect the people, thus, witchers. Though it’s doubtful everything will fall into place so neatly in Blood Origin.
It’s important to note that the series will take place in the world of elves before its fall, a world that will appear drastically different from the medieval setting we’ve seen previously. Hissrich stated to TechRadar:,
There is little information on the story, except that it revolves primarily around three elves. One named Eile, our likely protagonist, had been a warrior in her Queen’s Guard and left to travel the world as a singer. But she may be roped back into her former profession through unforeseen circumstances. The series is also extremely well cast. Sophia Brown (Girl/Haji) plays Eile. The wonderful Dylan Moran from Black Books will play a character named Uthrok One-Nut. And Michelle Yeoh, whose list of notable accomplishments is far too long to recite here (Crazy Rich Asians, Shang Chi, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon), will play an elf named Scian who is looking for a sacred sword.
How the Origin Originated
The story of how the series came to be is one of those romantic moments of creative inspiration. De Barra said it was “one of those rare sort of David Lynch in the café moments.” He’s talking about when Lynch recorded his inspiration for Twin Peaks on the back of napkins in a café. Apparently, he did something similar when coming up with the idea for Blood Origin, and the producers were very excited to see his results.
When the prequel was requested by Netflix, the group of producers and showrunners for The Witcher got together and looked for creative spaces in the novels of Andrzej Sapkowski. They found that there was very little detail around the time prior to the Conjunction and De Barra became very excited about the world that he could build. “This whole time in [Sapkowski’s] books, he reinterprets folktales and history, […] And when you look at our own history, societies that had been at their height, like the Roman Empire or the Mayan Empire, would be right before the fall and then we’re in dark ages again. That fascinated me to wonder what that [elven] world could have been and what society would have been like. That’s what we’re going to explore here.”
By adapting folktales and histories, De Barra was able to create a new series that surprised even the rest of the crew working on the show. Instead of the medieval setting of The Witcher, Hissrich said this might look something close to the Enlightenment.
