Double Drop Alert: The Witcher Season 4 May Arrive With The Rats — As A Standalone Movie, Not A Series

The Witcher rumor mill has spun up again, and this one is catnip for anyone who remembers Ciri riding off with a pack of teenage terrors at the end of season 3. Word is that The Rats spin-off didn’t vanish after all — it may have morphed into a standalone movie dropping alongside season 4. Emphasis on rumor, but there’s enough inside baseball here to be interesting.

The rumor in a nutshell

• According to What’s on Netflix, The Rats is now a feature-length one-off titled 'A Witcher’s Tale' and is set to land the same day as season 4: October 30.
• Mairzee Almas (The Sandman, Shadow & Bone) reportedly directed it.
• Haily Hall (Power) is said to have written the script.

Wait, The Rats... who?

The Rats are the young, morally-flexible crew Ciri fell in with near the end of season 3. Talk of a spin-off centered on them first bubbled up in 2021, complete with a very on-brand logline:

"Six teenage thieves must rely on their criminal skills as they plan the biggest heist of their careers against the most dangerous crime ring in the kingdom."

Then came the production whispers. In 2023, fan accounts claimed cameras were rolling in South Africa. By 2024, the pendulum swung the other way: reports said the project had been scrapped, with footage or concepts potentially getting recycled into a special episode or flashbacks for the next season. Through all of this, Netflix has never officially announced The Rats in any form. Classic Witcher chaos energy.

Where season 4 fits into this

Season 4 is the big reset: Liam Hemsworth steps in as Geralt of Rivia. The storyline is expected to pull heavily from Andrzej Sapkowski’s third Witcher novel, 'Baptism of Fire', with Geralt and Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) trekking across a war-chewed Continent to find and protect Princess Ciri (Freya Allan). If The Rats movie is real and arrives day-and-date, it would sit right next to that rollout — either as a companion piece or a neatly timed side quest.

So... should we believe it?

Take it as a strong maybe. What’s on Netflix has planted the flag, the title 'A Witcher’s Tale' is floating around, and the creative names attached make sense. But until Netflix actually says something out loud, file this under believe-it-when-we-see-it. Either we’re getting a stealth Rats movie on October 30, or we’ll see those elements folded into season 4 via a special or flashbacks — which, to be fair, has been the alternate explanation for months.