By The third season of Netflix’s The Witcher starring Henry Cavill, Anya Chalotra and Freya Allan is deep in post-production with a target Summer 2023 release. While there’s no big news during this period, The Witcher‘s VFX Supervisor Sébastien Francoeur and producer Graeme Marshall spoke to Screenrant about Blood Origin, Season 3 and beyond. Here are some of the most interesting bits of the lengthy interview.
Never Seen Before Monsters, Magic and Lore in Season 3
Speaking about the upcoming third season, the two producers revealed where they are regarding the schedule and teased never seen before content:
“We’re in the throes of delivering the final couple of episodes on [Season 3], and it’s super cool. I don’t think it’s anything that anyone’s read or seen before in Witcher lore, so I think it’s gonna be exciting.“
They elaborated on some details and teased new monsters in the next season:
“We’re working on some pretty tasty stuff for the next season. We’re at the point where we’re showing the creative team now, and they’re being wowed by the stuff we’re showing them, so that’s cool. [We have] a pretty short sequence with a nice creature, but we have a longer one with a big creature, also, that’s cool.“
On creative licence and staying true to the books or not
During the same interview Marshall and Francoeur discussed the creative licence of VFX artists and the balance of staying true to the source material.
“We were referencing pretty much one for one some of the magic, and they were like, “No, we can’t, we don’t want to go down that road.” I think there’s a lot of fans of one or the other and you don’t upset one without doing something that the other likes, etc.”
Speaking of the creative team, the producers commented on their dedication to the lore of The Witcher: “They were very careful about keeping it true to the lore, true to the realm, true to the Witcher.“
They also answered a question regarding taking inspiration or visual cues from the games vs. Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels:
“We cannot follow what has been done on the video game. That’s the first rule we learned when doing it, because Season 2 is really based on the novel. It’s what has been written, it’s not the video game, you cannot extract information and start from there. It’s the same source, but it’s another branch literally.“
Graeme Marshall added: “It’s like the novels are the guidebook, but not the Bible by any means.“
Francoeur and Marshall spoke further about The Witcher being creatively separate from the books and the games:
“I feel like this is where they’re separate from the video game or separate from the books is kind of allowing them to explore other storylines and other places and things like that.
I think that’s working well for them so far. It’s different from watching a show like The Last of Us, in which the first episode is the beginning of the video game. Whereas with this, I think there’s a lot of creative license to stay similar and true to certain parts and enable them to explore different parts as well.“
On The Witcher Season 4
Regarding The Witcher Season 4 that is set to be Liam Hemsworth‘s debut as Geralt of Rivia, the producers’ answer was rather short: “As far as season 4 is concerned, we haven’t really gotten too heavily involved just yet.”
If you recall, Season 4 of The Witcher is currently being written with Season 5 following soon after with Netflix planning to produce both seasons back-to-back.
READ MORE: Netflix’s The Witcher Still on Track For Seasons 4 and 5
Francoeur and Marshall go deeper into their work on the creatures of Blood Origin and how they made the Conjunction of Spheres so do read the full interview.
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.
