The final season of The Witcher isn’t coming this year after all.
Season 5 was widely expected to land in 2026, an assumption built on Netflix’s own marketing materials and the show’s shooting schedule. It’s now slated for a 2027 release, according to a new report.
Nobody announced this. It just quietly moved.
The season has been finished for a while
Filming on the fifth and final season wrapped back in September 2025. That was shortly before season 4 arrived on Netflix in October 2025, which is the detail that makes the delay stick out.
New seasons of The Witcher have generally dropped every other year. By that math, season 5’s arrival is the anomaly, not the pattern.
Seasons 4 and 5 were produced and filmed back-to-back. Showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich said last year that the writers treated “season 4 and 5 as one large story.”
“We knew we had to break it up in terms of how it would be launched on Netflix, but truly it’s the story of this family journey back together, and I think when we’re choosing specifically what details to include from the books, we look for a really sort of diverse sort of swath of things,” Hissrich said, adding, “And at the end of the day, it has to be 16 narrative episodes that feel cohesive.”
Sixteen episodes conceived as one story, split across two seasons, with an extra year now wedged into the middle of it.
Season 4 was the show’s worst reviewed
The fourth season represented a low point for the live-action fantasy series, which picked up some of its worst critical reviews ever. Some viewers also turned on the show after Geralt was recast.
That recasting is the fault line the show has been living on. The Witcher debuted on Netflix in 2019 with Henry Cavill as Geralt of Rivia. Cavill stepped away in 2022, and Liam Hemsworth (The Hunger Games, Independence Day: Resurgence) took over the role.
The rest of the cast held: Anya Chalotra as Yennefer of Vengerberg, Freya Allan as Ciri, Eamon Farren as Cahir Mawr Dyffryn aep Ceallach (aka Black Knight) and Joey Batey as Jaskier.
Cavill, for his part, is now busy bringing the Warhammer 40,000 franchise to Prime Video.
There’s still Witcher coming, just not on Netflix
Fans have something else on the horizon in the meantime. CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 4 stars Ciri as its primary protagonist and is planned to kick off a new trilogy of games.
So the schedule now reads like this: a finished season sitting on a shelf, a game built around Ciri in development, and Andrzej Sapkowski waiting for everyone to grow up and discover books.
