How Many Episodes Is The Witcher Season 3 Altogether?

"The Witcher" Season 3 gives fans yet another installment of Geralt's epic journey on the Continent, but viewers have a little more time to savor the release of this entry compared to the show's first two seasons. Rather than using Netflix's traditional method of dropping all of the episodes from the new season at once for binge-watching enthusiasts, "The Witcher" has split its third season into two batches. The first set released on June 29, while the second part is slated for July 27. With this unique strategy for the show's rollout, viewers may be wondering just how many episodes in total they have to look forward to in Season 3.

The first part of "The Witcher" Season 3 clocks in at five episodes, while the second part rounds the slate out with an additional three episodes. When combined, the entirety of the third season will have a total of eight episodes, granting it the exact same episode count as the first two seasons. The runtimes for the three episodes that haven't aired at the time of this article's publishing are still unknown, but they are likely in line with the typical hour-long episode structure of nearly all previous episodes. As such, "The Witcher" Season 3 is expected to have a total runtime of approximately eight hours.

Considering that "The Witcher" Season 3 is set to have eight episodes just like previous seasons in the series, fans may be wondering what prompted the team behind the series to split it into two parts. As it turns out, Season 4 of fellow Netflix series "Stranger Things" played a part in the decision. "Whilst we were in production, 'Stranger Things' had come out, and they had split their season. And it was like, 'Well, that's intriguing,'" executive producer Steve Gaub told The Verge.

With the precedent set by "Stranger Things" and other shows like "You," as well as the creative team finding a specific narrative point in "The Witcher" Season 3 where they could have a natural split, the decision was cemented. "In a streaming world, cliffhangers don't really exist because you're hitting play [right after an episode ends]," Gaub said. "You don't get that satisfaction of the anticipation and discussion and chatting online. So we wanted to give that to the fans, and the story was there for us to do it."

As for whether fans should expect "The Witcher" Season 4 to follow the same model in its episode distribution, the team isn't ruling it out as a possibility. "We are using all of those lessons in Season 4, and there are several amazing cliffhangers there, so who knows?" executive producer Tomek Baginski said. "It's an option, but it's not decided yet."