If the fictional world of Netflix’s new blockbuster 3 Body Problem is weird, then its journey from Chinese sci-fi novel to millions of TV screens is even stranger.
On March 22, Xu Yao, a former executive at the company that owns the rights to the series, Yoozoo, was sentenced to death by a Shanghai court. His crime: poisoning Lin Qi, the billionaire sci-fi enthusiast who had spent $150 million buying the rights to the novel to transform it into the next Star Wars.
The series opens with a spectacular scene set at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution.Credit: Netflix
Lin, an executive producer on the Netflix adaptation, was obsessed with 3 Body Problem. Xu was obsessed with Breaking Bad. Chinese business magazine Caixin reported he tested more than a hundred toxins in his lab and then fed them to cats and dogs in Shanghai before killing Lin with probiotic pills laced with poison.
The court found professional jealousy was the motive behind the murder.
Lin, known in China as the “billionaire millennial” never got to see 3 Body Problem hit 11 million views in its first four days. The 39-year-old was murdered in 2020 just after Netflix signed the $200 million deal with Game of Thrones creators David Benioff, and Dan Weiss to transform author Liu Cixin’s mind-bending Chinese epic for the small screen.
Poisoned: Yoozoo founder Lin Qi.Credit: Yoozoo
The series is almost incomprehensibly ambitious. It takes viewers from the first decades of Communist rule in China through to a global mission to stop an alien invasion. Now it is dividing fans in China and around the world.
That’s because it opens in the grips of the Cultural Revolution - Mao Zedong’s violent struggle for ideological purity in Communist China that cost at least one million lives between 1966 and 1976.
Hong Kong-born director Derek Tsang does not hold back. His depiction of a “struggle session” in which a scientist is beaten to death after teaching physics is brutal. So too is Tsang’s window inside Chinese labour camps where “thoughts are dangerous” and prisoners are forced into confessions through torture.
Poison and politics: The bizarre backstory to Netflix’s latest blockbuster
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28.03.2024
If the fictional world of Netflix’s new blockbuster 3 Body Problem is weird, then its journey from Chinese sci-fi novel to millions of TV screens is even stranger.
On March 22, Xu Yao, a former executive at the company that owns the rights to the series, Yoozoo, was sentenced to death by a Shanghai court. His crime: poisoning Lin Qi, the billionaire sci-fi enthusiast who had spent $150 million buying the rights to the novel to transform it into the next Star Wars.
The series opens with a spectacular scene set at the height of........
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