Having suffered more downs than ups over the last few years – which includes the widely-despised conclusion to Game of Thrones, the sensibly cancelled Confederate, and a brief flirtation with Star Wars – David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are finally making their way back to screens with Netflix’s 3 Body Problem.
The massively ambitious and inordinately expensive sci-fi epic based on the novel of the same name by Liu Cixin follows an astrophysicist who gets conscripted by the military due to her scientific background and sent to work in a secretive facility located in a remote region of China, where a single decision made in the 1960s will end up reverberating across space and time to a group of scientists in the present day.
The trailer won a lot of people over after premiering at the recent TUDUM event, but there’s a bittersweet element to 3 Body Problem in the wake of producer Lin Qi’s alleged murder. The billionaire had made it his life’s work to bring the source material to as wide an audience as possible, buying up copyrights and licenses connected to the book, as well as establishing a production company specifically for that end, which was fittingly named Three-Body Universe.
While an official release date hasn’t been announced by the company itself, What’s on Netflix has claimed that the show will premiere on New Year’s Day, which is guaranteed to yield massive viewership figures.
There’s enough distance between Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon that they won’t cannibalize the other, while Cobra Kai ended up as one of the streamer’s biggest-ever shows by debuting its third and fourth seasons right around the time the clock drops on a brand new annum, so let’s hope it manages to deliver a fitting binge for what’s sure to be the first of 2023 for many.