Is The Witcher spin-off series Rats doomed?

The Witcher had everything going for it in the beginning. Magic, monsters, political messes. A cold lead with a sharp sword and a broken heart. The kind of setup that pulls people in fast. And it did. The first season landed with noise, not perfect, but strong. People talked. Posted. Watched again.

Then came the spin-offs. Or the idea of them. Some left a mark. Others didn’t quite stick. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Rats appeared. Quietly. No big build-up. A side project, but not unimportant. A thread from the books, now stretched into its own thing. Or that was the plan.

A series that stalled before it could start

Rats was meant to follow a group of young criminals who show up in the original The Witcher story. Violent, impulsive, wild. Not the charming rogue type. These were kids shaped by war, poverty, and trauma. Angry and dangerous, yet oddly loyal to each other. They aren’t heroes. But they aren’t just villains either.

Filming began. Or something like filming. Reports say one, maybe two, episodes were shot. No trailers. No official stills. And then silence. Not the slow fade-out kind. The sudden, awkward kind that makes fans start guessing.

The confirmation came quietly but clearly. Redanian Intelligence, known for tracking The Witcher news, stated that Rats was no longer moving forward as its own show. What had been filmed would be turned into a single episode, folded into the main series. That’s it.

What’s left and where it might end up

Instead of six episodes, there’ll be one. A reworked, rearranged patch of what was originally meant to be a full arc. Netflix chose to keep what it could and release it under a new name: The Rats: A Witcher Tale. Not a separate show anymore. Just a piece of Season 4.

That name feels like a label on a file that got moved to a different drawer. It’s still there, but in a place it wasn’t supposed to be. There’s no guarantee the tone, pacing, or depth survived the change. Scenes built for something larger may now feel like fragments, glimpses of a story that never got its center.

Why it didn’t work out

Officially, nothing was said. But context fills in the blanks. Interest in The Witcher dropped after Season 2. Viewers got tired. Some blamed writing. Others missed the balance of the early episodes. And then Henry Cavill left, which, like it or not, broke part of the show’s core for a lot of fans.

When a franchise starts to wobble, side projects take the first hit. Spin-offs are expensive and don’t always offer safe returns. Especially not ones about lesser-known characters doing morally grey things. Rats was a gamble. And Netflix, it seems, didn’t feel lucky.

The Rats in the source material

In the books, the Rats show up during a dark stretch of Ciri’s journey. She’s not the same by then. Not the princess, not the lost child. Something colder. Angrier. The gang becomes a kind of family. Brutal, chaotic, broken. Her time with them changes her in ways that ripple through the rest of the story.

Turning that group into the focus of a new series made sense in theory. They had personality. Conflict. That unstable energy that makes good television when it lands. But maybe it didn’t land. Or maybe it never had the chance to.

The Witcher and the mood around the franchise

There’s a shift that happens when enthusiasm turns into hesitation. Viewers start to hold back. Ratings slow down. Reviews get sharper. The Witcher is in that space now. Not fully dismissed, but definitely watched with more doubt than before.

And into that climate came Rats. A small, strange idea needing time and trust to grow. Both are in short supply. Timing matters. If this had launched two years earlier, when the main show was still carrying momentum, the result might’ve been different.

But it didn’t. And so, it joins the list of shows that almost happened.

Release window and expectations

Season 4 of The Witcher is expected in 2025. That’s when The Rats: A Witcher Tale will likely appear. Not as a pilot, not as a teaser for more, just as an episode. It might drop before the season, maybe as a prologue. Or somewhere in the middle, as a flashback. Netflix hasn’t said.

There’s no talk of continuing the Rats storyline beyond that episode. No plans for a revival. No spin-off of the spin-off. It’s a one-time thing now. A leftover folded into the evolving structure of The Witcher universe.

Final thoughts, or something close to it

This isn’t a grand failure. More like a quiet retraction. A step back disguised as a pivot. The Rats didn’t crash. It just never fully launched. What’s left is a single hour, more or less, built from pieces of something larger.

Still, there’s curiosity. What was it trying to be? What tone did it reach for? What version of the Witcher world did it want to show?

Maybe the episode will offer clues. Or maybe it’ll feel like a puzzle with missing edges. Something that belonged to a bigger picture is now framed on its own.

And that’s where it ends. Not with a debut. Not with a finale. Just a name, a file, an echo of what might’ve been.