The Witcher producer blames Americans and impatient young people for the show's declining viewers
Topics: UK News, US News, The Witcher, Film and TV, Entertainment, Netflix
Dominic Smithers
Featured Image Credit: Netflix
Topics: UK News, US News, The Witcher, Film and TV, Entertainment, Netflix
Since the new series of The Witcher landed, it's come in for some heat.
The much lauded fantasy series is one of the biggest Netflix series ever, with fans of the game and the novels praising its star, Henry Cavill, for his perfromance.
As well as the acting abilities on display, followers of the saga were locked into the storyline, much of which stayed close to the original text.
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However, the third instalment, which hit the streaming site recently, has divided fans with many upset at how far it has moved away from Andrzej Sapkowski's novels.
And it appears to have potentially affected the viewing figures for the series.
According to the Samba TV report, there was a 15 per cent drop in the number of US households tuning into The Witcher series premiere, falling from 1.3 million to 1.1m.
Well, discussing the reason behind a change of approach to the show's storyline, executive producer Tomek Baginski said it was pretty simple.
"It’s painful for us, and for me too, but the higher level of nuance and complexity will have a smaller range, it won’t reach people," he said.
"Sometimes it may go too far, but we have to make these decisions and accept them."
Baginski explained that when looking at a series, one of the biggest issues is how to market it to the broadest number of people possible.
This means, he said, making the storyline as accessible as you can.
For example, he said that he was faced with a 'perceptual block' with US audiences a years ago, when he was working on an unfinished movie called Hardkor 44, which was a science fiction reimagining of the Warsaw Uprising.
Baginski recalled: "[I] tried to explain: There was an uprising against Germany, but the Russians were across the river, and on the German side there were also soldiers from Hungary or Ukraine.
"For Americans, it was completely incomprehensible, too complicated, because they grew up in a different historical context, where everything was arranged: America is always good, the rest are the bad guys. And there are no complications."
It was an experience he never forgot, and one that fed into his work on The Witcher.
"When a series is made for a huge mass of viewers, with different experiences, from different parts of the world, and a large part of them are Americans, these simplifications not only make sense, they are necessary," he said.
"When it comes to shows, the younger the public is, the logic of the plot is less significant.
"Those people grew up on TikTok and YouTube, they jump from video to video."