Amazon are really trying to beat Netflix and HBO to the next big Game of Thrones-sized success.
After recently purchasing the rights to a TV adaptation to Lord of The Rings for $500 Million, they’re not stopping there. This week, the Financial Times reports that the studio is in talks to adapt critically-acclaimed Chinese novel series The Three-Body Problem into a three-season show, the price of this being a staggering $1 billion – before shooting even begins.
Written by Liu Cixin, the best-selling novel is broadly about aliens preparing to invade Earth.
1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China’s Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.
Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang’s investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredictable interaction of its three suns.
This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists’ deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces.’
Barack Obama cited the three-volume book as “just wildly imaginative, really interesting… the scope of it was so immense”.
Have you read the book? Are they worth ONE BILLION DOLLARS?!
Let us know in the comments below…
Irwin Fletcher
I'm an LA journalist who really lives for his profession. I have also published work as Jane Doe in various mags and newspapers across the globe. I normally write articles that can cause trouble but now I write for FTN because Nerds are never angry, so I feel safe.
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