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 announced via their social media channels that The Witcher, their latest Original Series, is receiving the prequel treatment.

We Got This Covered reported the same story one month earlier, well before Netflix was 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 Witcher: Blood Origin will be 1200 years prior to the adventures of Geralt Of Rivia.

What were the Witchers' first names?

Although the history of Witchers is tragic and bloody, we don't have much information about the first Witchers, other than the books by Andrzej sapkowski.

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.

Many people debate the validity of these stories, and the added content, but Sapkowski has spoken out to explain how he feels about this adaptation.

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.

Explore new horizons

The prequel will not only explore the history of Witchers but also the birth of the universe.

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 is the showrunner for the series. He had this to say about it:

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 is the third Original in the series and it will take place within the same universe of The Witcher as the animated feature The Witcher Nightmare of the Wolf.

Do you look forward to The Witcher: Blood Origin as much as I do? Comment below to let us know!