Coinciding with today’s panel at the star-studded San Diego Comic-Con, Netflix has released the first-ever footage of its upcoming fantasy series The Witcher. It’s the best look yet at Henry Cavill’s Geralt, who looks to be a buffer version of the monster hunter popularized through Andrzej Sapkowski’s literary works and CD Projekt RED’s game adaptations.
Showrunner and writer Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, who was present during the panel, mentioned the show would be based on 1993’s “The Last Wish” Witcher novel. This seems like a sensible starting point, being that the book collects some of Geralt’s earliest stories (the character was originally introduced in the mid-80s in a Polish magazine).
It explains the backstory of the elves, who taught humans to use magic, and were then betrayed and “slaughtered” by humans. When one character asks Geralt whether life is just about “monsters and money,” he replies, “That’s all it needs to be.” We also glimpse Yennefer’s transformation from a disfigured young woman into the beautiful sorceress we know her as.