Toss a coin to your streaming platform. Netflix’s The Witcher is on track to become the platform’s biggest Season 1 debut ever. The streaming giant held its Q4 2019 earnings call today and revealed that more than 76 million households watched The Witcher in its first four weeks of release. The call also notes that release of the show contributed to an overall “global zeitgeist” that saw a surge in popularity for Witcher books, games, and even that catchy song that nobody can get out of their head and has been covered six ways from Sunday.
For Netflix, which has a lot of popular original content, The Witcher set to become the biggest Season 1 debut is a huge metric, reassuring fans that showrunner Lauren S. Hissrich’s grand vision for the show can be met across multiple seasons. She has a potential seven seasons outlined that will cover the entire book series. Hissrich has detailed some elements of the second season already, which will be more linear than the first but isn’t expected to air until 2021.
Netflix had already greenlit a second season of The Witcher before the first aired. The earnings call didn’t provide any direct metrics or comparisons to other Season 1 debuts to show what The Witcher is up against, nor did it clarify why it is “tracking to be [its] biggest Season 1 TV series ever” as opposed to already claiming that title. This is the same platform that released popular streaming exclusives like Stranger Things, House of Cards, and all of The Defenders Marvel TV shows. The Witcher was the most demanded TV series at the end of 2019, even beating out popular series on competing platforms like Disney+’s The Mandalorian.
Along with future seasons of the Netflix show, The Witcher books’ author recently renegotiated a deal with CD Projekt RED, the developer behind the popular games. While the developer may not have anything to announce just yet (currently focusing on polishing up the delayed Cyberpunk 2077 for release later this year), it’s expected that they could have another Witcher game in the works.
[Source: Netflix]
