To say The Witcher: Blood Origin’s Christmas Day premiere has not gone down well with fans of the franchise would be an understatement as the prequel series has kept accumulating negative scores on every review site out there with no sign of it stopping anytime soon.
Blood Origin chronicles both the creation of the first Witcher, as well as the historical events that preceded the Conjunction of the Spheres cataclysm that shaped the Continent depicted in Andrzej Sapkowski’s books and CD Projekt Red’s video games. Nevertheless, one of the main criticisms hurled towards the show by reviewers before its release was the lack of connectivity to the mainline series, something only worsened by Henry Cavill’s departure from the show.
All that considered, it’s no surprise The Witcher: Blood Origin opened to some of the worst reviews by any Netflix show in 2022, faring even worse when it comes to user ratings as the series holds a measly 10% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing. Over at Metacritic, the user score is an abysmal 0.7, whereas on IMDb Blood Origins has a more respectable 4.0 out of 10, altogether making it one of the worst-received pieces of content on Netflix as a whole.
For comparison’s sake, Netflix’s most recent video game bust, the Resident Evil live-action series, had an all-time low user score of 26% on Rotten Tomatoes that’s now been easily eclipsed by Blood Origin. It’s not as if The Witcher prequel is doing any better with critics as its 33% rotten score puts it only above five other series on the platform: Friends From College (24%), Blockbuster (22%), Between (22%), Disjointed (19%) and Insatiable (12%) — some reviewers outright state Blood Origin deserves no attention after new upgrades to The Witcher 3.
Granted, it’s safe to say Blood Origin has suffered from review bombing triggered by Cavill’s decision to leave the series, especially since there are heavy rumors his exit may have been partly driven by growing creative differences with The Witcher’s writing staff. Regardless of that, the four episodes of Blood Origin did manage to creep into Netflix’s global top 10 for English language content with 15 million hours’ worth of watch time, albeit being in the number 7 spot behind the likes of Sonic Prime and Emily in Paris.
The Witcher: Blood Origin was created by Declan de Barra and Lauren S. Hissrich, both key people behind the main series, whose ability to keep the franchise afloat will be thrown into question after this unsuccessful spinoff. While it’s likely The Witcher’s third season with Cavill will be popular, Liam Hemsworth sure has a big task ahead of him.
Source: Rotten Tomatoes; Metacritic; IMDb