What We Already Know About Season 2 Of The Witcher

If you’ve seen the first few episodes of The Witcher (or heck, the entire season) and are totally hooked, we have the most excellent news: Netflix ordered The Witcher season 2 before season 1 even started streaming.

On 13th November 2019, The Witcher’s showrunner Lauren S. Hissrich confirmed that we’ll definitely be getting more Geralt (Henry Cavill), Ciri (Freya Allen), Yenner (Anya Chalotra), and Roach. Their journeys have only just begun. On behalf of Netflix, Hissrich announced, “I’m so thrilled that before fans have even seen our first season, we are able to confirm that we’ll be returning to The Continent again to continue telling the stories of Geralt, Yennefer and Ciri.”

While it hasn’t been confirmed and you should take this all with a grain of salt, Witcher blog Redanian Intelligence procured an alleged start date information from Netflix that says filming will begin in February 2020 in London and Budapest. The show will likely film in several more locations, though. Redanian Intelligence cites an interview with executive producer Tomek Baginski who said, “We are still scouting in all Europe, including Poland, so it is hard to say how much we will shoot and where, but the plan is to have some great Central European locations on the screen.” 

It’s predicted that we’ll get a second season of The Witcher in spring of 2021 (so far away!), but it also wouldn’t be super shocking if it even took a bit longer, considering how impressive the production is. Luckily for us, the story has already been written — it’s just a matter of putting the pieces together. 

We know that season 1 of The Witcher is based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Last Wish (published in 1993), which is a book of short stories. And the show doesn’t even perfectly mirror the book, according to Baginski. He tells Comicbook.com, “...the books were a lot more source material than we could fit into eight episodes. So we have to really be very, very careful with choosing which stories we want to tell.”

Season 2 could start anywhere. Sapkowski has a number of short story collections, a pentology, and one standalone novel, so The Witcher universe is vast (which is good news for us!). Sword of Destiny (published in 1992) is where Geralt actually meets Ciri, so it seems likely that the showrunners will pick and choose source material from that book next (although nobody knows for certain). After that, these are the Witcher books that were published in order: Blood of Elves (1994), Time of Contempt (1995), Baptism of Fire (1996), The Tower of Swallows (1997), and Lady of the Lake (1999). Lastly, the standalone novel Season of Storms was published in 2013. George R.R. Martin who? (JK, we love you, but like, please finish writing your dang books.)

Hissrich hints to what season 2 could be about, but she doesn’t confirm anything, only telling CinemaBlend that The Witcher season 1 was basically a warm-up: “This season, of course, carried a lot of weight because you’re setting up the entire world. You need to set up all of the characters, you need to set up the politics, you need to start to understand what a Witcher is and what they do and how that’s changing in the dynamics of the world. The first season carries a lot of weight, but there’s a lot of things that we did this season to set up events that we know we want to happen in season 2 and beyond.”

According to Deadline, Hissrich confirms that Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri will be returning, which is not super surprising, considering they’re the main characters of the series. So the good news? No major-major Game of Thrones deaths... for now.

It hasn’t been confirmed, but it looks like we’ll be getting at least seven, according to Hissrich. In fact, she told CinemaBlend she’d be down to write 20 if she could (yes, please). “It’s funny, because I said in an interview that I could write seven seasons. I also said I’m sure later that day I could write twenty seasons if given the opportunity. I could keep writing the show for a very long time. As long as people are interested in it and as long as the source material is there to organically build from,” The Witcher’s showrunner says.