We haven’t gotten much news recently about 3 Body Problem, the Netflix series from Game of Thrones showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, as well as Alexander Woo (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, True Blood). The series based on the books by Cixin Liu, however, got a trailer today that hints at some of the plot points we’ll see in the show—which include some shifts away from its source material.
According to an interview on TUDUM, a Netfix-run website, the showrunners talked with Liu early on in the development process and got his blessing on certain changes to the books, including “chronological shifts, character tweaks, expansions, additions, and setting the present-day story primarily in the U.K.”
Woo spoke to TUDUM about the changes. “The experience of watching a television series is different from watching a feature film, [which] is so different from the experience of reading a novel,” he said. “What we are hoping to do is to convey the experience—if not necessarily the exact details—of the novel onto the screen. What stayed, we hope, is the sense of wonderment and the sense of scope, of scale, where the problems are no longer just the problems of an individual or even a nation, but of an entire species.”
Any changes to the source material are hard to judge until we’ve actually seen the screen adaptation, so I’m going to withhold critique here. The trailer for the adaptation does a good job, however, of conveying the grandiose nature of Liu’s story, the sense of unyielding dread at humanity’s apparently inevitable destruction, and also seems to tackle the books’ virtual reality component in a compelling way. Call me intrigued!
3 Body Problem stars Jess Hong, Benedict Wong, Eiza González, Jovan Adepo, Alex Sharp, John Bradley, Saamer Usmani, Liam Cunningham, Rosalind Chao, Jonathan Pryce, Marlo Kelly, Sea Shimooka, Ben Schnetzer, and Zine Tseng. It’s executive produced by a lot of folks, including Bernadette Caulfield, Rian Johnson, Ram Bergman, Nena Rodrigue, Brad Pitt, Jeremy Kleiner, Dede Gardner, Rosamund Pike, Robie Uniacke, Lin Qi, Zhao Jilong, Fenfen Xu, and Xiasong Ga.
All eight episodes of 3 Body Problem premiere on Netflix on March 21, 2024 (a bit later than the previously announced January 2024 release). Check out the trailer below.
