Or at least, five different movies are being made, based on Liu's work. China Film Group Corp. is making three movies based on Liu's books: The Wandering Earth, The Era of the Supernova and Micro Era. Add to that two other Liu Cixin films: The Rural Teacher and a Three-Body Problem movie trilogy.
Liu himself will write the screenplays for at least the three films being made by China Film Group.
With China becoming a much bigger market for Hollywood science fiction epics, to the point where films like Looper, Iron Man 3 and Transformers: Age of Extinction include Chinese characters and subplots, this shouldn't come as a big surprise. China's audience is hungry for big spectacles, and it makes total sense for more of these to be homegrown — and for China to start building its own answer to Hollywood. Expect more of these films to get imported to the U.S. and become blockbusters stateside, within a few years.
China.org.cn quotes Liu as saying:
Chinese science fiction movies have just started their journey, and we have never made big budget sci-fi movies before. But everything has to have a beginning. If we don't try, we will have nothing.