The Witcher season 4, released on October 30, 2025 on Netflix, unveils in eight episodes the handover between Henry Cavill and Liam Hemsworth, under the direction of Lauren Schmidt Hissrich. Between Geralt seeking allies, Yennefer rallying the sorceresses, and Ciri drifting towards the Rats, the fourth chapter of The Witcher series prepares for its final season in 2026 and embraces a cautious narrative transition. Release date of The Witcher season 4: October 30, 2025 on Netflix.
The Witcher season 4 on Netflix: an anticipated return, a new face
On the release date of The Witcher 4, October 30, 2025, the series returns with a full season 4 of eight episodes. The series hasn’t changed its course, but it has changed its face. Liam Hemsworth in The Witcher takes over the role of Geralt of Rivia, succeeding Henry Cavill in The Witcher, who had imbued the monster hunter with a chivalrous stiffness, sharp humor, and granite stoicism during seasons 1 to 3. The handover is not a simple replacement. It’s a craftsman’s gamble: to make the audience accept another incarnation without denying the memory of a hero who has become familiar.
Showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich orchestrates this transformation with a deliberately mischievous caution. "I was looking for a physical and sensitive Geralt," she confides, assuming a choice of actor that favors agility as much as presence. The transition is not a snap of the fingers, nor an explanatory card. It uses a storytelling trick, a sort of echo chamber where the past surfaces in reinvented scenes, to gently install the new face of the witcher. The process does not aim to deceive: it seeks to retune the ear and the eye, to transform the viewer’s confusion into active curiosity.
The Witcher actors: Cavill, the cast shadow; Hemsworth, the clear line
The departure of Henry Cavill was officially attributed to scheduling issues and other projects. Persistent but unconfirmed rumors have mentioned creative differences; they remain in the realm of "according to," and should be kept at a distance. Cavill leaves behind a Geralt sculpted by a well-known passion for fantasy and video games adapted from Andrzej Sapkowski’s work. His successor does not imitate; he bends.
Liam Hemsworth takes on the role through the body, then through silences. He crafts a Geralt slightly less massive, more mobile, attentive to flaws. His diction retains a brief irony, and his gaze seeks the other. Then, he closes in on the decision. Hissrich claims an actor combining agility and listening. We understand what she means: on screen, the musculature is no longer a flourish. It becomes a resource among others, serving a character made cautious by pain.
In the viewer’s imagination, this shift acts like a change of focus. The cast shadow of Cavill remains, but Hemsworth’s clear line asserts itself through action scenes and low pauses where the series likes to breathe. The continuity of the tone and the grain of the voice, adapted, form a passable threshold: Geralt is recognized without confusing the actor.
A fragmented epic, intersecting trajectories
Season 4 picks up the pieces of a trio separated at the end of the previous season. Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri no longer travel in unison. Each seeks the other differently, according to their own logic of survival and loyalty. The narrative becomes airy, almost polyphonic, with those zoom shots that have become the series’ signature: a village swept by rumor, a clearing where time crumples, a council room where strategy is far from a peaceful chess game.
Geralt moves forward with new allies. The archer Milva carves a path through the forest for a brotherhood without emphasis. And Regis, mysterious companion played by Laurence Fishburne, bursts in as a promise of fertile ambiguities. The witcher is no longer just the taciturn wanderer; he becomes, by necessity, an assembler of talents. The group is not a battalion: it’s a makeshift team, connected by the reciprocity of debts.
At the other pole, Yennefer gathers the sorceresses. She regains the verticality that defines her but tempers it with a listening we hardly knew. Facing Vilgefortz, the adversary with tenacious aims, she mobilizes both diplomacy and the brilliance of her power. The series offers her council scenes where political intelligence takes precedence over the spectacular; a way to remind that magic here is primarily a science of context.
Among the characters of The Witcher), Ciri embraces an identity with sharper edges. Nicknamed Falka, she slips among the Rats, a group of young bandits whose staging cultivates fever and insolence. The season accompanies this drift with the necessary restraint not to reveal its sleight of hand. It quickly becomes clear that each trajectory, far from being a monologue, prepares a connection with the others. The world of the Continent expands without diluting.
Staging of The Witcher S4: the secret of a passage
The visual grammar remains faithful to the mineral aesthetic of The Witcher: weathered armors, herb necklaces, steel ringing clear under a rain of ashes. The settings, often natural, retain this roughness of moor and marsh. The fights exploit more the mobility of Hemsworth, whose choreography favors axis breaks and shortened dodges. The camera, now less heavy, ventures into the melee then retreats. It’s as if it seeks to feel the breath of the blows.
The actor transition, extremely delicate, is lodged in the details: a shot that cites an old gesture, a line repeated "in minor," a memory that recomposes the common memory. The series plays with its own history so that acceptance is not a verdict. On the contrary, it becomes a spectator’s experience. The result is a gentle strangeness, a sidestep that awakens curiosity.
A divided French reception, but solid arcs
From the online release on October 30, 2025, the French press expresses reservations. L’Éclaireur Fnac delivers a harsh opinion on the tone, some effects, and the writing, while Numerama highlights the solidity of Ciri and Yennefer’s trajectories while pointing out staging limitations. Meanwhile, HuffPost relays the doubts of some fans about the arrival of Liam Hemsworth. The assessment remains mixed, without erasing the narrative support points.
The discussion is as much about what it says about the series. And it also reveals our expectations towards fantasy. The Witcher has never sought the excess of pure epic. It prefers fracture, crack, ambiguity. Its pleasure is not the catalog of creatures, but the study of the moral cost of each decision. In this register, season 4 maintains a consistency that explains the audience’s loyalty.
Around the screen: a companion TV movie and measured promises
In counterpoint, Netflix accompanies the season with an autonomous TV movie: The Rats: a The Witcher story. The more compact format allows for illuminating the group linked to Ciri without distracting from the main plot. The strategy resembles a narrative interlude, an off-text that enriches the reading of the series. The choice confirms the publisher’s appetite for appendices that densify the universe without burdening it.
This abundance is backed by a certainty: season 5, expected in 2026, will be the last. The horizon is clear, the destination announced, and the promise of a well-crafted ‘payoff’ resonates in the team’s words. The final chapter will have to resolve the lines of force patiently laid out: Ciri’s transformation, Yennefer’s anxious sovereignty, Geralt’s contested ethics. It will also have to settle the ambivalence of Regis, whose troubled nobility holds a future stake.
From book to screen, then from games to series
It is important to recall the original material. The short stories and novels by Andrzej Sapkowski have imposed a tone that is as much a dark ballad as a political satire. The video games by CD Projekt then converted this material into an interactive experience, while in turn feeding the series’ imagination. The nods exist, but the series avoids lazy mimicry. It seeks less to reproduce than to extend, at the assumed risk of displeasing part of the community.
Season 4 pushes this logic by substituting nostalgia with a tightrope curiosity. It knows what it owes to its past; it allows itself the right to a slightly off-center present. Therein lies perhaps its best idea: to put back into play what was thought to be acquired, whether it be a face, a voice, a predetermined destiny.
Characters of The Witcher and music: the world’s breath
Anya Chalotra lends Yennefer an authority that opens, cautiously, to consultation. Freya Allan confirms a Ciri more nervous, less lyrical, and never disembodied. Joey Batey returns to Jaskier that tender irony that teases without canceling gravity. Laurence Fishburne, as Regis, needs only a few scenes to establish a magnetic presence, an art of diction that turns each phrase into a promise.
The music remains this discreetly lyrical carpet that knows when to be silent. The orchestrations gain in sobriety, the motifs return without grimacing. Tavern songs are no longer comedic pauses, but moments of shared memory. The series, as a whole, breathes better when it renounces the clamor of the flashy. It then appears more adult, closer to the melancholy that irrigates the Continent.
Communication and behind the scenes: the art of opening the door without showing everything
The launch campaign multiplied images of the The Witcher casting, teasers, and key visuals. Netflix took care to maintain the mystery around Liam Hemsworth’s appearance while preparing the audience for the idea of change. The photographs often played the card of the reformed trio, as if to say that the compass remained unchanged: Geralt, Yennefer, Ciri. Behind this strategy, one can guess a tight dialogue between production and communication. Each is keen to convert apprehension into availability.
Set secrets surface, told in half-words by the team: an adjustment of armor design for more flexibility, revised choreographies to match Hemsworth’s agility, increased attention to the texture of landscapes. Nothing spectacular in a flashy sense, but a bundle of micro-decisions that create the impression of novelty.
What season 4 really changes
Beyond the handover between actors, the essential is played out in the view of the community. The series embraces its taste for unlikely alliances, temporary pacts, friendship as a weapon. It moves away from a pyramidal mythology to rediscover a politics of the margins. One fights in a group, negotiates in a circle, chooses together. Solitudes remain, but they learn to connect without dissolving.
Here and there, one will recognize digital effects that still lack depth, dialogues that underline. On the other hand, there are council scenes of rare sobriety, confrontations where the argument weighs more than the flash. The assessment is not a verdict: it testifies to a series that evolves in real-time, with sure strengths and persistent blind spots. The promise of season 5, already announced as the final, acts as a reminder: there is still time to complete the gesture.
Final season 5 in 2026: an announced end, an intact appetite
That season 5 is the last confers a particular intensity to the present. The viewer knows that each episode counts, that each choice prepares the exit. The series has chosen the clear path, that of the announced destination. It no longer has to accumulate; it can tighten. It’s a chance, if it seizes it, to conclude without fanfare. Thus, it remains faithful to its morality of compromise and debt.
At the end of these eight episodes, The Witcher retains what sets it apart: an attention to the ethics of combat, a taste for ambiguous attachments, a way of breathing between duels. The new Geralt does not erase the old one; he responds differently, and that is the whole point. The attempt is to be continued, but the course is maintained. In the noise of calibrated productions, this consistency is a signature.