Netflix officially greenlit Season 2 of 3 Body Problem (took them long enough!). One of the streaming giant’s most popular titles, Collider reported that filming for Seasons 2 and 3 will happen back-to-back.
3 Body Problem Season 2 is “Bonkers”
If you have not yet seen Season 1, the premise of the sci-fi TV series created by Game of Thrones’ David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, along with Alexander Woo, follows Ye Wenjie, a Chinese astrophysicist sent to a secret military base to make first contact with aliens during the Cold War. In present-day London, several phenomena and mysterious suicides led a group of friends to investigate events that are of extraterrestrial origin.
The entertainment outlet also reported major changes in the show. The studio moved the shooting location from the UK to Hungary, perhaps because of the Hungarian government’s 30% tax incentive. For Season 1, the show saved $56.1 million from a 25% incentive. With Hungary’s 30% incentive, the production cost savings grew to around $80 million.
Showrunners Benioff and Weiss admitted to facing some challenges interpreting Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past. The novel series is the show’s source material. They wanted to create a show that didn’t “dumb down” the science. But it is still understandable to those without a background in the show’s scientific and complex nature.
Weiss said, “You don’t want people to be pushing pause and hitting Wikipedia every five minutes. In the book, he’s explaining all this stuff to you anyway in writing. It was a challenge, and ultimately, that was what drew us to the project in the first place.” Although The Guardian reported that the reception in China is negative. The backlash stemmed from the simplified “difficult concept of science fiction” since it was “roughly transformed into a simple visual spectacle.”
Season 2 of the show will adapt Cixin’s second novel, The Dark Forest, which is more technical. Weiss promised that the second season is going to be more “bonkers.” He added, “This kind of eases you into the world of the story, but the story gets really wild in the best possible way. With something that’s that wild, there are a lot of choices to be made and a lot of things to be figured out. We’ve been putting our heads together to figure them out recently, especially over the past couple of months.”
Production of 3 Body Problem is scheduled to begin on July 8 and continue until August 2, 2027.