Want Even More Three Body Problem? Good, There's A New Movie On The Way

We've had one space race, yes, but what about a second space race? Granted, this latest one is probably a tad less dramatic than the U.S. and Russia vying for bragging rights to the moon during the Cold War. But since when have sci-fi fans ever let facts get in the way of a good story, anyway?

Only months after Chinese author Liu Cixin's seminal book trilogy "Remembrance of Earth's Past" finally received its biggest and most expensive adaptation with Netflix's "3 Body Problem" series (which yours truly reviewed for /Film here), yet another attempt to bring the immensely popular, Hugo Award-winning material to life is now in the works ... this time, for the big screen. And Chinese audiences couldn't possibly have asked for a more exciting or reliable name to help bring this across the finish line. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the alien-invasion epic is set to receive its feature film debut from prominent Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou.

The breaking news was revealed during this year's ongoing Shanghai International Film festival, with Zhang's involvement adding a burst of star power that far outrivals the likes of the "Game of Thrones" creators, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, tackling the American adaptation. Zhang is basically a living legend in his home country, perhaps best known among Western audiences for directing the Jet Li-starring wuxia hit "Hero" in 2002, the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics (along with handling the same responsibilities during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games), and the Matt Damon-starring "The Great Wall" in 2016. Meanwhile, fans are more than familiar with his success directing film-festival darlings in his early years and several box-office juggernauts in recent years. Adapting "Three-Body Problem," however, might just represent his biggest challenge yet.

Liu Cixin's "The Three-Body Problem" has inspired several adaptations — or, at least, attempts at adaptations — over the years since its debut in 2008. A Chinese-language film infamously began production back in 2016, but never actually completed filming and officially remains "postponed indefinitely." More successfully, a television adaptation by Chinese studio Tencent simply titled "Three-Body" debuted only last year, running a total of 30 episodes and remaining stringently faithful to the novel (almost to a fault, in fact). Netflix's "3 Body Problem" is credited for introducing the material to the outside world, making several sizable changes but otherwise maintaining the property's hard sci-fi trappings.

Largely considered one of the greatest sci-fi novels in the country's history, the story of "The Three-Body Problem" takes place over several years (or make that several hundreds of years, when including the sequels) following our first contact with extraterrestrials and the subsequent effect this has on humanity as a whole as the desperate alien race sets out to conquer Earth. Things get extremely nerdy and mind-bogglingly weird, to say the least, making it awfully hard to imagine how a film adaptation would even play out ... at least, without either ending up cutting the source material to the bone or earning a staggering, butt-numbing runtime. Luckily, that's the 72-year-old director Zhang Yimou's problem now. There's no word on casting or a release date, but fans will soon have an embarrassment of riches to choose from when it comes to adaptations of this uber-popular story.