After Henry Cavill announced that he would be leaving the Netflix fantasy TV show The Witcher, several diehard fans of the video game adaptation vowed to boycott it by not watching any more episodes.
Cavill is set to be replaced by Liam Hemsworth in playing the show’s main character, Geralt of Rivia. Now that the first five of eight episodes of season three of The Witcher have been released, it looks as though fans are making good on their boycott promise.
According to data, The Witcher season three garnered 73 million hours watched in its first four days of availability. This works out to around 14.6 million hours watched per episode.
By contrast, when season two arrived on the streaming service, there we 142.43 million hours watched in the first four days, which worked out to around 17.8 million hours watched per episode.
It’s not a massive drop for the series, but it is noticeable and may well be linked to the proposed boycott after the departure of Henry Cavill and the arrival of Liam Hemsworth was announced.
Many fans of the show had called for the show to be cancelled altogether if Cavill could not play the lead character. The Hemsworth-starring season is yet to arrive, so viewing figures can be expected to drop even more when it does.
Watch The Witcher season three trailer below.
