By It has been a minute since we first revealed back in November that a new live-action Witcher spinoff was in the works and what’s more, even in pre-production in South Africa. There has been much silence since and with the release of Blood Origin, a certain amount of doubt whether Netflix was going forward with it. Now, we can confirm that the Rats spinoff is still on and we have a few more new details.
New Working Title and Shooting Dates
As we revealed back in November, the new Witcher series centered around Rats was in the works in South Africa under showrunner Haily Hall. Thanks to Daniel RPK, we now know that its working title is now ‘Riff Raff‘
Filming for Riff Raff is planned to span from April to September 2023, all in South Africa, primarily Cape Town. We don’t know the number of episodes just yet, but based on the filming dates it could be either six or eight.
The story of the Rats spinoff
Finally, there is a brief logline for Riff Raff: “Six teenage thieves must rely on their criminal skills as they plan the biggest heist of their careers against the most dangerous crime ring in the kingdom.”
We can take away a few things from this: there are six of them, meaning this is a prequel, before the Rats met Ciri. Also this is a heist story, which are seemingly popular nowadays.
As to the job itself and the crime ring in question, we don’t know anything as it wasn’t described in Andrzej Sapkowski’s books. It’s entirely new, created by the writers of the show. It’s hard to speculate on topics like these when there is no source material.
The cast of Riff Raff aka Rats
With all of that said, we do know four out of six cast members for the Rats as they are set to appear in the final two episodes of The Witcher Season 3. They are Christelle Elwin as Mistle, Fabian McCallum as Kayleigh, Aggy K. Adams as Iskra and Juliette Alexandra as Reef. We are still yet to discover who plays Asse and Giselher.
Regarding when Rats will be released, the filming schedule here is almost identical to The Witcher Season 3, so one can speculate that this series may be aimed for a Summer 2024 release. But we’ll see.
Season 3 of The Witcher is in post-production for a Summer 2023 release. The live-action prequel The Witcher: Blood Origin had just had a December 25 release and the Rats spin-off is in pre-production Stay tuned to Redanian Intelligence and do pop into our Discord server to join in on The Witcher conversation.
This has all the hallmarks of another Blood Origins like failer.
failure*
At least the cast is diverse enough to tick that checkbox. Now all they need is to put some effort in the story…