Wait, there was a new live-action Witcher movie? Starring Dolph Lundgren? On Netflix? In October?

Dolph Lundgren as a Witcher holding a sword

(Image credit: Netflix)

I'm not a big Witcher fan but I am a big movie and TV fan, so I try to keep up to date on all the videogame-related films and TV shows. Several times a week, if not every single day, I scan the news, press releases, and entertainment sites for any info about new game-related adaptations.

So how the heck did I miss that there was a whole new live action Witcher movie. On Netflix. Starring Dolph Lundgren. And it came out in October of this year. It wasn't just me: a bunch of us at PC Gamer, movie fans and Witcher fans alike, missed it too.

It's called The Rats: A Witcher Tale, a feature-length special that serves as a prequel to Season 4, and you can watch it right now on Netflix—though judging from evidence I'm about to present, I'm not sure Netflix really wants you to.

Weirder still, I searched the official YouTube channel and there's no trailer or even a teaser for it. That strikes me as especially bizarre: you produce and film and edit an entire 1 hour 22 minute live-action Witcher movie and don't even throw together a single 30-second teaser on your YouTube channel that has 32 million subscribers? I know Dolph Lundgren isn't exactly a Henry Cavill-sized draw, but he's—dare I say it—at least a Liam Hemsworth-sized draw. If you advertised Lundgren as a Witcher, you'd at the very least get some curious eyes on it. And even if it stinks, surely you want people to watch it? Isn't Netflix pretty brazenly keen on total views above all other concerns?

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

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