40,000 Witcher fans sign petition to keep Henry Cavill

Henry Cavill has set down his steel and silver swords and will no longer play Geralt of Rivia in Netflix's The Witcher in its final season. In spite of his diplomatically worded statement, fans are not taking this news well and the petition to bring the actor back has reached 40,000 signatures.

Cavill will reprise the role in the third season, however, the signs that the actor would be exiting stage left were there from the end of the second season. A report from Redanian Intelligence asserted that Cavill struggled to see "eye-to-eye" with the show's producers. Cavill is fan of Andrzej Sapokowski’s source novels and even rewrote some of the scenes to be much more representative of the original character.

"Netflix executives have once again made a grave decision against delivering for their fans," reads the petition - starting off sounding a little like a villain's monologue, I've got to say. "The reason why The Witcher is such a popular show is the fans’ love of the source material of books and games, that are hated by and have actively been mocked by the writers and showrunner." They're not exaggerating for effect. The Witcher producer Beau DeMayo recently revealed that a fair few on the writing team on the show did not like the books or games at all.

"We already had to suffer through the disaster that was the end of Game of Thrones - NETFLIX don’t repeat the exact same mistake of holding onto writers and showrunners that believe themselves to be superior to the actual creator of the stories that made them successful," concluded the petition. Cor. At the time of writing, over 43,000 fans have thrown their lot in with the petition.

Of course, it's Liam Hemsworth who will be stepping into Geralt's well-worn shoes. You may remember this Hemsworth from such movies like The Last Song, The Hunger Games, Independence Day: Resurgence and he was also in an episode of The Muppets.