A real-life mystery shrouded 3 Body Problem long before production got underway on the big-budget Netflix series.
The shoot itself wasn't plagued by anything more nefarious than creators David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and Alexander Woo deciding they needed five more minutes of footage to improve what was basically a finished product—after which the WGA and SAG strikes delayed the filming of that scene, meaning it wasn't ready for its originally scheduled 2023 release.
But on March 22, the day after the long-awaited adaptation of Liu Cixin's Hugo Award-winning sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem premiered, Xu Yao—a lawyer and former gaming company executive—was sentenced to death in China for the murder of his 39-year-old billionaire boss Lin Qi.
The Shanghai First Intermediate People's Court determined Xu was responsible for fatally poisoning Lin at his office in December 2020, according to the Associated Press. Lin, the founder and CEO of Yoozoo Games, was hospitalized Dec. 17 and died on Christmas Day.
Earlier this year, Benioff called Lin's death "certainly disconcerting," telling The Hollywood Reporter, "When you work in this business, you're expecting all sorts of issues to arise. Somebody poisoning the boss is not generally one of them."
To put it mildly, and the strange case ended up rivaling the plot of any scripted series: