There cannot be only one. The Three-Body Problem, the first book in Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past series, is set for another adaptation—and this time it’s headed to the big screen as a Chinese-language film directed by none other than Zhang Yimou, who The Hollywood Reporter aptly describes as “arguably China’s most revered living filmmaker.”
Zhang’s impressive body of work includes House of Flying Daggers and three films nominated for Best International Feature Film Oscars: Raise the Red Lantern, the Jet Li-starring Hero, and Ju Dou. He’s won a long list of festival awards and is also known for directing the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics and the 2022 Winter Olympics, both of which were in Beijing.
A previous attempt at adapting the book into film in China never came to fruition, but there was a 30-episode Chinese television adaptation, which was praised for its faithfulness to the original text. The novel has also been adapted in English, somewhat less faithfully, as David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s 3 Body Problem on Netflix. That series has been renewed for two more seasons, which should allow it to cover all three books in the trilogy.
No casting or release date has been announced for Zhang’s film.
