What has ‘The Witcher’ showrunner said about the show’s 7-season plan?

The Witcher has been making plenty of headlines recently due to the news that former lead actor Henry Cavill will be leaving the show, and that Independence Day: Resurgence actor Liam Hemsworth will take over the lead role. 

This has led to many people talking about The Witcher’s seven-season plan and how this change in actor could affect that plan.

Here is everything you need to know.

What has The Witcher’s showrunner said about the plan?

This seven-season plan was first talked about during the development of the first season. In an interview with SFX Magazine in 2019, The Whitcher’s showrunner, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, said she had mapped out stories for seven seasons, responding to a question about the second season’s storyline with: “Second season? I’ve done it for seven seasons!”

Then in 2021, Hissrich talked to IGN about the future of The Witcher just before season two launched. During this interview, she discussed the state of the plan stating: “It would be a straight translation of the books… I think there’s just so much material that I don’t feel the need to start inventing my own to keep it going.”

She further elaborated by saying they would “really try to stick to a book a season. We did combine some of the short stories for the first season, and there are things in the short stories that we want to continue to return to, because there was just too much good material to tell in eight episodes. So for instance, that’s why we did A Grain of Truth at the beginning of this season, and it’s our hope to keep peppering those in as we go.”

While the concept of going beyond the books was raised, Hissrich said this would likely be confined to spin-offs. “I think that one of the beauties of building out a Witcher universe is that you can actually use those spin-offs to do slightly different things than the books did. But to me that actually makes it even more important that in the mothership series we always stick to what Sapkowski intended. To me, I just don’t think it’s my responsibility to continue those stories when he clearly felt there was a natural ending.”

It should be noted that seven seasons, while now the expected number, wasn’t always a set-in-stone thing. Just before season two landed, Hissrich did an interview with Collider, and during this interview, the seven-season plan was asked about. Hissrich responded by saying: “I love that seven seasons became the thing that we go to. Because I think at one point I said something, I would go for like 20 seasons. And I’m glad that no one actually expects me to have 20 seasons, I would be dead by then.” She then goes on to say that the reason they started with seven seasons was that they wanted to “stay true to the books.” And they didn’t: “feel the need for our story to go beyond where the books go.” 

She does note, however, that during the time the show was in production, the author of The Witcher series, Andrzej Sapkowski, had released a new book, and she would “have to see how that fits into it”. So while seven seasons were planned, it is clear that some flexibility was built into that.