Producer on Game of Thrones showrunners’ new series dies from poisoning

Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss are making a show based on sci-fi series The Three-Body Problem. Producer Lin Qi has just died after being poisoned by a coworker.

A few months back, Netflix announced that it was adapting The Three-Body Problem, a tremendously popular science fiction series by author Liu Cixin. At the head of the project are Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, with True Blood writer Alexander Woo serving as showrunner. The series also has the participation of production companies belonging to Brad Pitt, Rosamund Pike and Rian Johnson. It was shaping up to be a big deal.

But the series has been dogged by controversy. Not long after the announcement, a group of Republican Senators wrote a letter to Netflix expressing their disapproval of the project, or at least of any involvement from Cixin, who had been listed as a consulting producer, although it was unclear how involved he would be. The author had made statements in support of the Chinese government’s internment of Uyghur Muslims, widely seen as a human rights violation by the international community. Reasoning that Cixin’s opinion had nothing to do with the story and that he wasn’t running the show anyway, Netflix vowed to move forward.

Now, an even more unexpected turn: according to The Hollywood Reporter, The Three-Body Problem producer Lin Qi has died as a result of poisoning. He was 39. The poison was slipped into his pu-erh tea. What’s more, the suspect in custody is Xu Yao, a senior executive at the film and television division for the Yoozoo Group, where Lin Qi was chairman. So essentially, this executive killed his boss.

The first question I had when I read this was: why? Unfortunately, THR doesn’t know much, saying only that there was ” a dispute among the Chinese entertainment company’s executive ranks.” Must’ve been a big dispute.

The Yoozoo Group acquired the rights to The Three-Body Problem a while back and sold them to Netflix after an unsuccessful attempt to turn the series into a film. That may mean that Yoozoo wasn’t involved in the actual production of the Netflix show, instead acting only as an intermediary.

Whatever their role, this is a bizarre, tragic turn in the story of the show.

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