Can the ‘Game of Thrones’ Creators Make Magic Again?
The showrunners, together with a ‘True Blood’ vet, are back with ‘3 Body Problem,’ a big-budget science fiction epic about an alien invasion.
By Joe Flint | Photography by Chantal Anderson for WSJ. Magazine
Feb. 22, 2024 11:00 am ET
IN THE FIVE years since HBO’s Game of Thrones left the air, television executives and fans have waited to see what its elusive showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, would do next.
A Star Wars movie the pair signed on to never materialized. Another planned series for HBO, envisioning a post–Civil War America in which the South successfully seceded, was dropped after backlash.
To make matters worse, Benioff and Weiss, who have been friends since grad school, weren’t crazy about HBO’s then-owners, AT&T, whose executives once asked whether Game of Thrones could be shot vertically so it would fit on your phone. The company also openly discussed the idea of snackable mini-episodes of the series.
“Dysfunction kills more projects than anything else, whether it’s interpersonal
dysfunction or institutional dysfunction,” Weiss says.
Benioff nods his head in agreement. “When you sign a five-year deal with a company, you want that company to be stable so you can be left alone to do your work and not have to worry about it being bought by the phone company,” Benioff says. “Finding the smoothest ride in the ocean was key.”
Less than three months after the Game of Thrones finale, Benioff and Weiss left HBO for a development deal with Netflix worth between $200 million and $300 million.
Now the first fruits of their Netflix deal are finally coming to the screen in 3 Body Problem—another epic tale with a huge cast and elaborate visual effects. Only this time, instead of dragons and White Walkers, there are dehydrated bodies, complicated physics and an alien invasion.
The series, premiering this spring, is one of the most expensive projects Netflix has ever attempted, with per-episode costs in the $20 million range, say people familiar with the show’s budget.
“It is a big bet for me and the company,” says Peter Friedlander, the head of scripted content at Netflix. (In February, Netflix announced yet another new show the pair will produce, starring HBO’s Succession star Matthew Macfadyen.)
3 Body Problem is based on a series of beloved science-fiction books by Chinese engineer–turned-author Liu Cixin. They were translated to English starting in 2014 and quickly became a phenomenon among fans of the genre who were drawn to the story about a slow-moving alien invasion of Earth.
“One of the things that attracted us to this was how terrifying it was to contemplate adapting these books, because they’re so vast,” says Benioff, who along with Weiss worked with a third showrunner, Alexander Woo.
The first few episodes begin as a dark murder mystery and raise questions about God, a sign of the existential questions that will unfold.
The opening scene takes place during the 1960s, at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution, a period when academics were persecuted and educated youth were sent to work in rural areas. In the show, Ye Wenjie, played by newcomer Zine Tseng, witnesses the brutal and public murder of her physicist father before being sent to work the fields in Inner Mongolia, a precipitating event in the series. Flash forward to the present day, where top scientists seem to be killing themselves, a countdown clock suddenly appears in front of another scientist’s eyes, and a particle accelerator has just been shut down because it inexplicably stopped working.
How these stories are connected—how the aliens come in and what a “three-body problem” even is—is part of the suspense that drives the plot.
The show offers the kind of big, heady thinking that often encourages science-fiction fans to find parallels to the real world. The book’s author, Liu, told the New Yorker that people shouldn’t read too much into fiction. (“The whole point is to escape the real world!” he said.) And Benioff says he’s aware of climate change and pandemic analogies, but that there wasn’t any one issue they were considering when they wrote the first season.
“How does humanity come together or not come together in the face of an existential struggle?” Benioff says. “Whether it’s environmental stuff or Covid when it hit, did we come together in a meaningful way or not? And it seems like the answer would probably be not. The books take a pretty, I’d say optimistic, view of, maybe this is the one thing that could actually bring us together.”
To adapt the story for television, the showrunners shuffled the order of events in the books, in some cases taking scenes from the second and third books to inform the first season. “It’s going to make much more sense for the timeline,” says Woo.
And while the books jump between different characters with no known connections, the writers instead revolved their plot around a group of friends known as the Oxford Five, who are connected through a physics teacher.
“The television that we like to make—but also to watch—is rooted in character,” Woo says. “That’s why you come back.”
These kinds of choices, while they can make for good television, tend to aggravate hard-core readers of genre series, who often want purity over entertainment. Across Reddit, the books’ fans have expressed concern that the story will be too hard to adapt; those who were unsatisfied with how Game of Thrones ended are worried that the creators aren’t up to the task. Netflix isn’t available in China, but a Chinese adaptation of the books titled Three-Body is available on the streaming platform Rakuten Viki.
“There’s definitely pressure, but then again, when Thrones was coming out, I remember having insomnia and being terrified,” Benioff says. “It’s nerve-racking when it’s your first big thing, and it’s nerve-racking when you’ve been at it for awhile and people are like, ‘Well, do they still have it?’ ”
WHEN BENIOFF AND WEISS first read The Three-Body Problem in 2019, Netflix hadn’t secured the rights for the books, and it was still working to sign the duo.
Friedlander was a longtime fan of the trilogy, officially titled Remembrance of Earth’s Past, and had introduced it to Benioff and Weiss. He also introduced them to Woo, a veteran writer known for his work on HBO’s risqué vampire drama True Blood, another popular book adapted into a show. The three writers got to work in March 2020.
“Reading this was a transformative experience for me,” Friedlander says. “I had to talk about it all the time.”
The first book of the series, The Three-Body Problem, was published in China in 2008 and is largely considered to have put science fiction on the map in that country. When the book was translated for English-language audiences, it caused a sensation among Americans, winning a prestigious Hugo Award for best novel—one of the few times a translated title has won that award. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg picked it for his yearly book club. Barack Obama called it “wildly imaginative.”
Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin even blogged about it, calling it “a very unusual book, a unique blend of scientific and philosophical speculation, politics and history, conspiracy theory and cosmology, where kings and emperors from both western and Chinese history mingle in a dreamlike game world, while cops and physicists deal with global conspiracies, murders, and alien invasions in the real world.”
Former HBO chief executive Richard Plepler, who worked closely with Benioff and Weiss, believes they will deliver again: “You could throw those guys the keys and come back in two years and be very comfortable that they are going to deliver something remarkable.”
Adapting such a story for television forced the writers to be both visionary and practical. How, for example, could they be true to Liu’s science-fiction tale while making a big, broad show that won’t require viewers to have a physics degree?
The showrunners got Liu to sign off on their 3 Body changes. “He said, ‘I know you’re going to make a lot of changes. I know you’re going to make some of the characters female. You have to do what you have to do,’ ” Weiss says.
They set the story mostly in Oxford, England, instead of China. They considered MIT as
a shooting location, but Oxford won them over, in part because that’s where Game of Thrones was produced.
Benioff, Weiss and Woo wanted the cast to be more international, too. Among the more recognizable faces are Benedict Wong, who played a sorcerer in Marvel’s Doctor Strange, as an investigator in the series. They also hired John Bradley, best known as Game of Thrones’ schlubby bookworm Samwell Tarly, to play a mouthy tech entrepreneur. Liam Cunningham, who played Ser Davos Seaworth in Thrones, is a mysterious intelligence mastermind.
3 Body Problem has futuristic visual effects, including a virtual-reality game universe and scenes that depict the use of nanotechnology.
“The first season of Thrones was relatively low-budget and was not huge in scope and scale compared to what came,” Benioff says. The first season of 3 Body is big, but potential future seasons will really “ramp up” the effects.
Netflix’s binge model also led to creative opportunities, they say. Woo says the advantage is that unlike making a show that airs every week, there is less pressure to end every episode on some super-dramatic high or big twist to keep viewers intrigued.
“You don’t have to put artificial hooks where they don’t really belong,” Woo says.
Also, Benioff and Weiss like the idea of experimenting with formats. Back in their Game of Thrones days, the pair actually pitched HBO execs on doing three theatrical movies to end the series instead of the final 13 episodes spread across two seasons.
They were reminded, as Benioff puts it, that they were making the show for “Home Box Office.” Not, Weiss adds, “Away Box Office.”