3 Body Problem has been a ratings hit for Netflix—according to the streamer, it racked up 11 million views in its first four days—and fans are waiting to hear if all those tantalizing questions it left unanswered will be addressed in a second season. But even with all its twists and that one really brutal sequence, there’s a behind-the-scenes drama as shocking as anything contained within the series.
As reported in the New York Times, the saga has more than enough elements to fill a Netflix true-crime documentary series. In 2020, Lin Qi—the 39-year-old billionaire behind gaming company Yoozoo who’d optioned the film rights to Liu Cixin’s acclaimed The Three-Body Problem—was murdered by a former executive at his company, Xu Yao. Xu was recently sentenced to death by a court in Shanghai for the crime. The paper quotes a Chinese news outlet as calling the case “as bizarre as a Hollywood blockbuster,” and notes that while certain details haven’t been made public, this “tale of deadly corporate ambition and rivalry with a macabre edge” saw Xu—a lawyer who’d been at Yoozoo since 2017 and worked in the division specifically overseeing the Three-Body Problem rights—become enraged at work after a demotion.
That’s why he turned to the dark web and set up a lab (drawing inspiration, apparently, from a favorite TV show: Breaking Bad), testing poisons on dogs, cats, and other animals before turning to human targets. The Times cites China’s Caixin as reporting “between September and December 2020, Mr. Xu began spiking beverages such as coffee, whiskey, and drinking water with methylmercury chloride and bringing them into the office.” After he was arrested, “Mr. Xu reportedly declined to confess to the crime and did not disclose what poison he had used, complicating doctors’ efforts to save Mr. Lin’s life.” Four other co-workers were allegedly also on his list; the Times notes “he not only killed Mr. Lin, but also poisoned his own replacement.”
Though the Times was unable to get a Netflix quote for its story, the paper did point to a recent Hollywood Reporter interview with 3 Body Problem co-creator David Benioff—whose Game of Thrones HBO series served as the basis for Yoozoo’s strategy game Game of Thrones: Winter Is Coming—in which he was asked about the case. “When you work in this business, you’re expecting all sorts of issues to arise,” he said. “Somebody poisoning the boss is not generally one of them.” THR’s piece goes on to note that before Netflix took it on, The Three-Body Problem was in the works at Amazon Studios in 2018, a deal that was scuttled in part because “[Lin] was so obnoxious,” according to an anonymous insider that spoke to the trade. They also shared this chilling recollection: the Yoozoo team, which included Xu, “went out of the room [after the deal failed] and it was very dramatic. You could tell there was all this tension between them … [when Lin was murdered in 2020], I wasn’t surprised.”
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