The Witcher Season 4 Suffers Disastrous Drop In Viewership on Netflix

The Witcher was meant to be one of Netflix’s biggest shows of all time, and following season 1, that certainly looked like it might be the case. However, as the show evolved and new seasons dropped, it quickly became clear the series was in decline from season 2 onward and is, at best, what we’d dub a second-tier title. Season 3 saw a significant drop in viewership, although it was notably split into two. With season 4 now out, though, serving as the second-to-last outing for Geralt, have things turned around?

To recap, The Witcher returned for a binge release on October 30th after being split for its third season. It came back with a big marketing push and a significant change at the top of the cast list, with Liam Hemsworth taking over the character of Geralt from Henry Cavill. Reviews were ultimately mixed once again for the new season, with it carrying a 60% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, down from prior seasons, and audience scores were highly mixed. We gave the new series a three-and-a-half-star rating, calling it a refreshing boost but ultimately doing little to win back fans.

Let’s take a look at the stats from three different locations to see exactly how well The Witcher season 4 is performing thus far.

Netflix Top 10 Data

Let’s begin with the newly released Netflix top 10 data from the Netflix TUDUM site. Per Netflix’s press release, here’s how they sum up the performance for The Witcher season 4:

“Those looking for a more magical and mature spooky-weekend watch indulged in the new season of The Witcher, casting its spell at No. 2 on the English TV list with 7.4 million views. Season 4 introduces Liam Hemsworth as Geralt of Rivia, the monster hunter for hire, as he, Ciri (Freya Allan), and Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) are now scattered across the continent. Also new this season is Laurence Fishburne, who joins the cast as Regis.”

So the headline number is 7.4M views for its first four days. How does that compare?

There’s a bunch of caveats! No season 1 data is available for the show, as it premiered in 2019, long before Netflix introduced the daily top 10s globally and certainly before the weekly top 10 as we know it today. The only data we got at the time was the old viewership stat covering whether two minutes of the show was watched, which counted towards the viewership, which stood at 76 million, making it good enough for second place on the available data charts we had for the time, behind Bridgerton S1 and ahead of Maid.

We should also caveat that The Witcher season 2 launched on a Friday, so it only had 3 days to build viewership, and season 3 is split, so it had less runtime in week 1 to build bigger views early on.

That said, however you paint it, season 4 had a big drop in views compared to prior seasons, but did do better than The Witcher: Blood Origins:

Netflix Viewership Data – 1 Week Analysis

How about compared to other shows? That’s where things look even worse because it barely gets above some canceled shows and certainly not up to par with the likes of Netflix’s biggest hits like Bridgerton and Stranger Things. In fact, it’s not even in the same universe

Netflix Viewership Data – 1 Week Analysis

We’re going to put in multiple charts covering hours and views, though comparing seasons exactly for the views in this instance isn’t always the best when split seasons are involved, given the runtime changes when new episodes drop. Let’s begin with the views chart:

And now moving onto the hours chart, season 4 still lags behind season 3 despite there being half the number of episodes:

FlixPatrol Data for The Witcher

FlixPatrol, in case you didn’t know, is the tracker of Netflix’s top 10s in each country. What this allows us to do is see more granularly where the show is performing well and where it’s flagging, and pick up where it’s performing well.

From their data, we can see that the show has been struggling to pick up points in the top 10s, quite like season 2 and season 3 before it, and is already showing signs of falling away quickly.

Picture: FlixPatrol

Moving onto their heatmap, we can see where the series is picking up the most points, and it’s where you’d expect it to be. Europe is strong alongside India and the Middle East.

Interestingly, The Rats have only just started finding its way onto the daily top 10s in 21 countries, but only in the past day or so. Given that Netflix dropped it so quietly onto the service and most will only be exposed to it after completing season 4, that shouldn’t be too surprising. Eastern European regions seem to be the top performers thus far.

Samba TV

Finally, some data from Samba TV has also been put out, covering the launch in US households who also report a drop in viewership.

Yesterday, they posted data covering the first four days and commentary that states, “The first episode of season four was watched by 35% fewer households than season three (577k vs. 885k). Currently ranked as the series’ lowest-rated season yet on Rotten Tomatoes, that’s not stopping some fans who are still curious as to where this next chapter leads.”

For other comparisons, they’ve previously revealed that The Witcher: Blood Origin scored 1.3M US households in the first eight days. In its first weekend, Season 2 scored 804K US households for the premiere.

Of course, the data doesn’t matter so much as to the future of the franchise. Netflix has confirmed that season 5, which has wrapped filming and is currently in post-production, will be the last. As we revealed last year, Netflix scrapped its only other known project, a kids series, and The Rats limited series was revived into a movie that dropped alongside season 4 (quietly).

Did you enjoy the new season of The Witcher? Let us know in the comments down below.