The Witcher movie

So, Platige Image announced today that they will be working with the Sean Daniel Company (the producers of The Mummy and the upcoming The Expanse adaptation) on a feature film based on two short stories from The Last Wish: The Witcher and Lesser Evil. Thania St. John, the writer and producer for Grimm, Eureka and Veritas: The Quest will be responsible for the screenplay, and Tomasz Baginski, responsible for The Witcher intro (an Adaptation Distillation of the eponymous short story) will direct.

Update: in an interview for a local TV station, Baginski stated that the planned budget for the movie will be around 20-30 million dollars, and the movie will be most probably shot in Poland, but with an English-speaking actor cast as Geralt.

I could see Gerard Butler star.

Not really feeling the need for a witcher movie, tbh. The games themselves (as well as the books they're based on) are so big and expansive.

And the new movie will be based on stuff that was already done in the TV series, so the only virtue is, it'll be done better this time.

It'll be done more expensively this time. I liked that screenwriter's past work, but always reserve judgment til you see the finished product.

-sighs- If only Viggo Mortensen wasn't too old...

Indeed, he'd make a good Geralt.

Hopefully they won't screw this up. The Witcher is huge in Poland and CDPR's games just made it millions of fans worldwide.

I mean, isn't Geralt kind of a older dude already? He has grey/white hair.

Well yeah, but that's because of his witcher mutations. He's over a century old, and the white hair is just because I think he was born that way.

Yeah, but he's also athletic and pretty damn buff, something hard to recreate with real life actors, especially not with old actors.

Inb4 generic action movie with zero faithfulness to source material.

Depends on what you mean by "faithfulness" to the source material. If something deviates from the source material, but preserves the spirit of what the source material feels like, that's pretty good.

Unnecessary story deviations aren't really good though.

Most of the Witcher stories are short stories anyway. I would imagine maybe it'd be something like Witcher 1's plot with Salamandra and whatnot with a few big monster fights thrown in.

On a related note, a guy from IO 9 was invited to the set of The Expanse. His report gives me hope that SDC has good sense of management.

IMDB Pro lists Josh Holloway as Geralt and Anna Rust as Ciri, but I hardly trust it.

Faithfulness to the source material? Oh you mean to the original works from the Elric saga by Michael Moorcock, which has been stolen lock, stock and barrel by the "writer" of the books that the games riff on, who's been allowed to get away with copyright theft by the Polish government because they make their balance of payments look better?

Doubt it somehow.

Do you need water by any chance, dude?

Nope. Just an acknowledgment that the whole of this Witcher bullshit is based on theft and fraud.

Source? Seriously, where are you getting this from?

googled it, aside from some faint physical similarities between the protagonists (they both have long white hair) and the same nickname (White Wolf), there is almost no crossover, they're both "swords and sorcery" type novels, but the settings, characters and everything else are very, very different

Tam: you need some pepper with that salt, bro?

Precisely why I asked him if he needed water XD

I was going to post that I would be happy if Viggo Mortensen was cast, but I see that I already posted that one. XP

Viggo would be great, but he's 57, he's getting a bit too old to be playing an action hero like Geralt.

The 30- and 40-something guys in this list would all be pretty great, but I feel like this Anson Mount◊ guy would be the best. I mean, look at the guy, he's practically the real life Geralt.