Irae0;n7508220 said:
Am I the only one who thinks this movie is totally going to be cancelled? They're taking way too long to start shooting the movie.
A few months ago Sapkowski revealed that he was told who was chosen for Geralt at Polcon 2016. I think it was something around August or September. I mean, it's some progress at least. But in any case, this slowness at the production could, at the very worst, in my opinion, result only in a postponement of the movie release.
Furthermore, think of Sean Daniel Company. They were recently working on Ben-Hur last year and they currently have their attention headed towards the new Mummy film, two big-budget productions. Those have been being their priorities right now, so it's not like Baginski and Platige Image could push the movie forward immediately to them, but in the other hand that doesn't mean SDC is going to disregard it completely neither. Maybe Baginski was a bit overhyped about himself at foreseeing a 2017 release date without taking SDC's other projects into account.
I don't believe that an adaptation from two short-stories such as "The Witcher" and "The Lesser Evil" would require a big and complex production. Even if they wanted to include some other parts of the book, like "The Voice of Reason" passages (which I think would fit perfectly and enhance the flow of the plot), there are not much laborious elements to include in the movie other than three or four different sets with a medieval characterization, one single monster (a striga) and three or five use of simple signs. And, most importantly, there are not much characters in those short-stories to build a cast upon, especially relevant ones other than Geralt, King Foltest, Adda and Renfri (and maybe Nenneke and Iola). All of that in a 120 to 150 minutes of length, it's perfectly fine for an estimated $30 to $40 million budget, without losing any of the quality for a desired box office success.
I admit that this silence on providing any info is awkard, but on the other hand I don't see any reasons to believe that this project is not good on its concept. Moreover, it's known that they, Platige Image, had been recently working on a series of live action short-movies directed by Tomasz Baginski about some Polish legends that were released on YouTube. Perhaps that has been a way to focus on how they plan to go with the movie by teasing it with some minor works, at least for themselves, thus all this apparent lack of news. It's not like they're completely innactive.
Just so we don't feel empty handed about any cast announcement, take a look at this short-film from 2014, produced by Platige Image and directed by Baginski:
Ambition. It is starred by Aisling Franciosi and Aidan Gillen. Both are English speaking actors and appeared in Game of Thrones (as Lyanna Stark and Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish, respectively). The latter also starred in Quantum Break as the main villain, Paul Serene.
Given that The Witcher movie is said to be also English spoken, I'd not be surprised if both were cast as, respectively, King Foltest and Renfri (or Adda, after her curse is lifted, but that would make for an technically insignificant appearance, like what, 1 minute?, so that I prefer to stick with Renfri). Even more exciting is that, given this somewhat apparent proximity with Game of Thrones by casting two actors from it, I'd be even less surprised if that meant they've cast the so requested Nikolaj Coster-Waldau to play the role of Geralt.