The first reviews for The Witcher: Blood Origin are in, and critics seemed have swiped left on Lauren Schmidt Hissrich and Declan de Barra’s prequel.
Set over 1,000 years before the events of Netflix’s The Witcher with Henry Cavill, who critics have noted is painfully absent, The Witcher: Blood Origin follows seven outcasts as they team up to eliminate an unstoppable power.
Unfortunately, it looks like the first cabal they’ll have to break is the collective sigh from Hollywood cinephiles with a Netflix Press Account.
The London Evening Standard wrote, “How much Witcher is too much? Here’s your answer.”
Oof. Not a good start for The Witcher: Blood Origin.
If you still need to check out the trailer, here it is.
From Netflix: Every story has a beginning. Witness the untold history of the Continent with The Witcher: Blood Origin, a new prequel series set in an elven world 1200 years before the events of The Witcher. Blood Origin will tell a story lost to time – exploring the creation of the first prototype Witcher, and the events that lead to the pivotal “Conjunction of the Spheres,” when the worlds of monsters, men, and elves merged to become one. The Witcher: Blood Origin will release in 2022, only on Netflix.
Our projected audience score for The Witcher: Blood Origin
It isn’t easy running Blood Origin through our questionnaire with just one minute of footage; that may be the first thing we noticed. Given that this is a limited series, which should easily span three to four hours, we’ve somehow gotten less of a look at the Netflix original than Cocaine Bear. It’s only one of 30 questions we ask of a trailer, but it’s noticeable immediately.
Projected Audience Score for The Witcher: Blood Origin: 42 – 61.
Factors that impacted Blood Origin’s score:
- Little to no footage shared with audiences
- A lot of dramatic effects without meat
- Musical score doesn’t click with the way the promo is cut at times
- Unfinished special effects
- Little to no context about what is being conveyed on screen
Of course, Witcher fans may disagree, and that’s understandable. While we’ve watched every episode of The Witcher, no one at STW would argue that they’re super fans of the franchise. So it wouldn’t surprise us if the audience score jumped higher with a built-in base and more appreciation for what the series adds to The Witcher universe. But the trailer for Blood Origin and past successes of the film’s stakeholders suggest a score of between 41 – 61 with audiences. We originally put this one at 41 – 51 but gave it a boost because the cast and crew have demonstrated positive momentum on screen over the last five years.
What will fans think of Blood Origin?
Again, it’s hard to say. Fans surprise Hollywood with franchises like Origin. The trailer indeed suggests more work could have been done to improve the limited series, but that’s almost always true. Perhaps the showrunners have some surprises in store.
On a positive note, Blood Origin’s trailer has netted 41 thousand likes on 2.2 million views, which puts the click rate for the video at about 2 percent (not Ant-Man numbers, but far better than average). So there is an appetite for more from viewers.
And while we haven’t seen the limited series yet, building our prediction based only on available footage, the momentum of the project’s stakeholders as well as their track records, and the audience’s response to the promotional content available, our instincts tell us Collider summed up Blood Origin best in this realistic and unemotional excerpt among critics ranking it somewhere in the bottom of the pile of fantasy shows in 2022.
“Ultimately, your enjoyment of Blood Origin will depend on how invested you are in The Witcher universe and how convinced you are by the slapdash storylines it presents.”
That was our sentiment after watching the trailer too.