“The Witcher: Blood Origin,” a follow-up to the Netflix series “The Witcher,” is making headlines for having a shockingly low audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The new fantasy series was released on Christmas day and since then has earned a 33% critic rating and 10% audience rating on the site. Fans are not impressed with the prequel, which is set more than a thousand years before the events of “The Witcher.”
“Blood Origin” follows seven outcasts in an Elven world who “join forces in a quest against an all-powerful empire.” It’s currently the most-watched show on Netflix, but not the most loved by a longshot.
“’Blood Origin’ is to The Witcher television show as a slapdash downloadable expansion pack would be to the massively popular Witcher video games,” the Variety review says. “Only completists need apply.”
Many reviewers mentioned how “The Witcher” star Henry Cavill isn’t in the newest iteration, which just serves as another reason not to see it.
“Without the anchor that keeps the franchise grounded, it really is just a fantasy story without any of the things that make ‘The Witcher’ special,” the AV Club review states.
Fans of the original version of “The Witcher” were just as unimpressed as the critics.
“I can’t think of anything that could be worsened in this show. It is badly written, the plot is full of holes, the visuals are awful, even the performance of Michelle Yeoh is not up to her standard,” one person wrote.
“Those who made this mess should hide in the depths of the earth and never see the light of the sun again… Only by disappearing would they obtain peace in the face of this attack against everything that is good in this world,” another person agreed.
Most of the thousands of negative reviews were equally brutal.
“I think that wiping your eyes with freshly cut lemon can bring you to deeper emotional state than this piece of .. show,” another fan wrote. “The writers of Witcher, Rings of power and She-hulk are really showing the world that no matter how untalented you are, you can still pretend to be a writer.”
While some fans blame the historically bad Rotten Tomatoes scores on review bombing, the practice of people writing multiple negative reviews to intentionally bring the score down, this is unlikely the problem with “Blood Origin.” A Forbes reviewer noted how other popular titles which were supposedly review-bombed didn’t have audience scores as bad as 10%.