In the entertainment industry, success tends to beget success. Take Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past novel trilogy. Those novels were published between 2006 and 2010, and quickly gained a following of passionate fans who enjoyed the hard science-heavy story about humanity's turbulent first contact with an extraterrestrial species. Then 13 years later, Tencent released a Chinese-language TV series called Three-Body (the title is taken from the first book in the trilogy, The Three-Body Problem). Earlier this year, Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss teamed up with Alexander Woo to release an English-language TV adaptation on Netflix: 3 Body Problem.
And now, Enlight Media CEO Wang Changtian announced that there's a movie version of The Three-Body Problem on its way from Zhang Yimou, the director behind movies like Raise the Red Lantern, Hero and House of Flying Daggers. The news dropped this past weekend at the Shanghai International Film Festival and quickly spread around on social media:
enlight media chairman wang changtian announced at the opening forum of #SIFF that the movie version of “three-body,” that is co-developed by light chaser animation studios and three-body universe will be directed by zhang yimou. it’s currently in the pre-production stage pic.twitter.com/nw6SOLP2KR
— 🖼️ (@langyabangs) June 16, 2024
We can assume the movie will also be a Chinese-language production. The next question is: do we really need three adaptations of the same source material coming in quick succession? It's a little more complicated in this case, because while Hollywood is behind 3 Body Problem on Netflix, the Chinese film industry is behind the first show as well as the new movie, so it's not like Hollywood studios are just adapting the same story three times for the same audience.
And I guess it could be fun for fans of the series to get different interpretations of the material. The Chinese TV show sticks pretty close to the books while the Netflix series puts more of its own spin on things. We're not sure what the movie will bring to the series; it's in pre-production and there's no release date as of yet.
On the other hand, that is a lot of Three-Body Problem, and international borders aren't the barrier to watchability that they used to be. We'll see if all these adaptations feel different enough to justify their existence.
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h/t Deadline