Game of Thrones creators hope 3 Body Problem on Netflix is "as big as Thrones"

David Benioff and Dan Weiss are the creators of Game of Thrones, arguably the most successful show of the 2010s, and certainly one of the most talked about. They're now getting ready for their big-budget follow-up: together with Alexander Woo, they're producing a sci-fi show called 3 Body Problem for Netflix. Based on author Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past novel trilogy, the story is about a group of scientists who found themselves caught up in a worldwide conspiracy that may involve humanity's first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Are these aliens friend or foe?

More important, will the drama be compelling enough for people to care? Benioff certainly hopes so. "I hope it's as big as Thrones," Benioff told BBC. "Our goal really is to get to the third season."

The Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy is a sprawling affair that can't be told onscreen with one season of TV. We don't even know if season 1 will be a hit, but Benioff and Weiss have an eye towards telling the whole story. “For Season 2, we’ve got better than a rough idea," Benioff told Collider. "We’re much farther along with that plan than rough-idea stages."

"From there on out it becomes, you know, the farther away things get the hazier your view of them is. But there, in the third book, there’s so many amazing landmarks, in terms of scenes and situations and events that we can see pretty clearly, that we know, we’re not completely sure how our characters are gonna get to that place, but we know they gotta get to that place. Because that place and that place and that place are the reason we pick these books up and wanted to adapt them in the first place."

Before adapting Game of Thrones, Benioff and Weiss famously said they wanted to get to the Red Wedding, which ended up being an iconic scene. Now it sounds like they're setting their sights on other big moments from this new series, in particular the final book: Death's End, which is much longer than the first two, so long that Benioff openly contemplated splitting it in two. “[T]he last page of Cixin Liu’s epic was maybe the best final image we’d encountered in a sci-fi saga like this. It’s just incredibly moving and mind-blowing,” Benioff said, adding that he and his co-showrunners are "desperate" to adapt it onscreen.

Game of Thrones showrunners "understand" how hard it is to wait years between seasons

So Benioff and Weiss are in this for the long haul, and they're willing to work as hard on this as they did on Game of Thrones. As Weiss said, 3 Body Problem is “a very labor-intensive show and it doesn’t get less labor-intensive. It doesn’t get easier to make, it gets harder to make.”

But will fans go along with them? Even if the first season is a hit, it'll probably be awhile before we see another, let alone a second or third; the spaces between new seasons of television have grown longer in recent years, a trend spurred on by Game of Thrones itself in its last couple seasons. “We understand— I think, it’s hard to see eight episodes of something you like and then have it disappear for a long period of time," Weiss said. "But it’s really kind of, the only way we can imagine doing it is one Season at a time.”

The best the producers can hope for is that 3 Body Problem is a hit out of the gate and gets renewed for multiple seasons right off the bat, much as Netflix did for its show Avatar: The Last Airbender. But whether it gets to that point will be up to viewers. The show drops its first season on Netflix this Thursday, March 21.

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