Major sci-fi work set for big screen test

Companies join forces to adapt the Three Body series for cinema audiences, Zhang Kun reports.

Beijing Enlight Media revealed that the company has joined hands with the Three Body Universe Cultural Development to work on the movie adaptation of the Three Body trilogy, which will be directed by Zhang Yimou, the international award-winning filmmaker who also directed the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

Wang Changtian, president of Beijing Enlight Media, revealed the project during the forum New Horizons in Film: Embracing Innovation and Diversity, an important part of the ongoing 26th Shanghai International Film Festival where insiders around the world meet to share their insights about the future of the industry and reveal their upcoming projects.

"We have started the preliminary work on the movie and believe it will be a big-budget production," Wang said during the opening session of the forum on Sunday. "I hope it will achieve breakthroughs in the international market."

The trilogy is arguably China's most celebrated science-fiction creation through the past decades. The novel by Liu Cixin won the prestigious Hugo Award and has been made into an animation series and TV series in China. Earlier this year, Netflix released a TV series adaptation, which received more than 123,000 ratings on IMDb.com, a leading worldwide resource platform for movie and TV productions.

Wang spoke about the project after sharing his findings that some genre films popular in the global market have not taken an adequate market share of the box office in China.

For example, he says, animation films take up more than 15 percent of the total box office in the United States while in China they take an average of 7 to 8 percent. Sci-fi movies are faced with a similar situation. This convinced him that more efforts should be made in the creation of animation and sci-fi films in China.

Wang believes that sci-fi movies represent the industrial height of a country and China still has a long way to go in this field.