The Wandering Earth: news and updates for China’s biggest science fiction movie

One of 2019’s biggest films has mostly slipped under the radar outside of its native China: The Wandering Earth, a movie billed as China’s first cinematic science fiction blockbuster.

The film is based on a novelette by The Three-Body Problem author Cixin Liu that follows the efforts of scientists and engineers who discover that the sun will destroy the Earth within the next century. To save humanity, they hatch an ambitious plan to use thousands of mountain-sized rocket engines to move Earth out of its orbit and travel around Jupiter to slingshot the planet toward another star 4.2 light-years away. But as they do so, the engine system fails, and teams have to rush to reactivate them before Earth crashes into Jupiter.

While the film has been enormously popular in China, it had a more limited release across the world. That will soon change, as Netflix has purchased the rights to stream the film worldwide.