In 2019, Chinese filmmaker Frant Guo gave his country its very first science fiction blockbuster, The Wandering Earth, a high-concept adventure film set in 2058 with planet Earth threatened by the imminent explosion of the sun. This year, Guo extended his vision with a prequel, The Wandering Earth 2, told years before the story of the first film. Collectively, the two movies have earned a whopping $1.36 billion ($700 million for the first and $564 million for the follow-up), amounting to China’s very first sci-fi franchise that can legitimately rival Hollywood in both scale and production values. A third installment has been announced for release in 2027.
In recognition of The Wandering Earth 2′s achievements — the prequel has an average critics’ score of 82 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, signifying considerable praise beyond China’s borders — Beijing’s Film Bureau selected it as the country’s official entry for the Oscar’s best international film category race.
The Wandering Earth franchise’s central story revolves around the coming explosion of the sun, which has inspired humanity — with China leading the way — to build enormous engines in an attempt to propel planet Earth outside of the solar system in search of a new celestial home. The films are a loose adaptation of a novella by acclaimed Chinese author Liu Cixin, whose 2015 sci-fi book The Three-Body Problem has become a global phenomenon (Netflix is adapting the novel into a big-budget series due out next year). The movies star some of the biggest names in Chinese film, including Wu Jing, Andy Lau, Wang Zhi and Li Xuejian.
“Generally speaking, our target was like a history of the future,” Guo says in a THR Presents video interview on his overall creative approach to the franchise’s sci-fi world-building. “It’s like a documentary shot from the future, but being watched today. So based on reality, we developed some variations in imagination.”
Guo says he’s built a friendly creative rapport with Liu during the yearslong process of developing his novella into three movies.
“Because we’re both creators and sci-fi fans, it’s really easy for us to communicate and we’ll talk about the direction we’d like to go,” he explains. “We talk about what we like about each other’s work and we’ll look for the middle ground, and we’ll try to find the right place to go.”
But the director also notes that his approach to the adaptation had more to do with the spirit of Liu’s work than the details.
“I hardly use [much of] the plot of his novel; instead, I use the core inside — his spirit,” Guo explains. “Liu’s understanding of science fiction — of the whole of The Wandering Earth, the very core inside the world view building — we employed them, extended and utilized them through audiovisual language.”
Even bigger than the first film, The Wandering Earth 2 was easily one of the most elaborate tentpole films ever mounted in China — and Guo acknowledges that the scale of the production at times presented challenges.
“We estimated the number of people involved in the film from beginning to end had reached 30,000,” he says. “In this way, 30,000 people meant the management of a super large enterprise. Did we have the related enterprise management processes? These problems became more obvious.”
Nonetheless, Guo says that he’s “most proud of the progress that was made” in refining the production practices between the two installments — and he’s enthusiastic about what he can achieve with the trilogy-completing next movie that’s now underway.
He adds: “In my opinion, our team is making much progress.”
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