The summer of 2020 is the gift that keeps on giving for Netflix subscribers that have a soft spot for the fantasy genre, with the streaming service dropping a number of huge new original movies and TV shows that have generated big buzz online and drawn in tens of millions of viewers in the process.
Almost as soon as the company released the list of their Top 10 most-watched in-house movies ever, they had to adjust the rankings after Charlize Theron’s The Old Guard racked up an estimated 72 million streams, while Warrior Nun easily overcame those early Buffy the Vampire Slayer comparisons to stand on its own merits as an action-packed success story, with second and third seasons reportedly already given the green-light.
If that wasn’t enough, a prequel spinoff to The Witcher was recently announced and the second season of The Umbrella Academy drops tomorrow, all while female-driven Arthurian story Cursed continues to dominate as the most popular scripted series on the entire platform. There’s almost no doubt that Nimue will be back for further adventures, but we’ve now heard the show’s breakout character could be set to headline their own spinoff, too.
According to our intel – which comes from the same sources that told us The Witcher was getting a prequel weeks before Blood Origin was officially confirmed, and that an Extraction sequel was in development well before Netflix announced it – Gustaf Skarsgard’s Merlin will reportedly star in a solo series that will follow his adventures as a warrior with Excalibur by his side, after Cursed briefly showed how the sword drove him mad with power and saw him turn his back on his people and abandon the use of magic altogether.
The Vikings star stole almost every scene he was in as Merlin, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that Netflix would be keen to cash in on his popularity and keep building on a mythology that they barely scratched the surface of in the first ten episodes of Cursed. And at this rate, it seems we should probably be bracing ourselves for confirmation of a Warrior Nun companion series any day now.
