Netflix
- Lin Qi, who helped bring "3 Body Problem" to screens, died before the series aired.
- He was poisoned in 2020 by Xu Yao, who headed up a subsidiary which oversaw adaptations of the book.
- Now, more than three years later, Xu has been given a sentence of capital punishment.
A former Yoozoo Games executive has been handed a death sentence for the murder of a producer on Netflix's sci-fi show "3 Body Problem."
According to The New York Times, the Shanghai First Intermediate People's Court found Xu Yao guilty of fatally poisoning Lin Qi, who was dubbed China's "billionaire millennial."
Yoozoo Games, which Lin founded in 2009, owns the rights for all adaptations of the sci-fi bestseller, including a stage adaptation, an animated series, and the Chinese-language series "Three-Body" which premiered last year.
Xu's sentence of capital punishment was handed to him on March 22, the day after the series created by "Game of Thrones" showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, along with Alexander Woo, debuted on Netflix.
Lin — who is posthumously credited as an executive producer on the series — died on Christmas Day 2020, at the age of 39, 10 days after he ingested a beverage that Xu had laced with poison, the court heard, as reported by CBS.
Zhang Zhi/Red Star News/VCG via Getty Images
According to court documents cited by the Associated Press, four other people also fell ill as a result of Xu poisoning drinks in the Yoozoo offices between September and December 2020 but did not die.
One of them was Xu's replacement as the head of the subsidiary that controlled business related to the sci-fi book series, per The New York Times.
As Business Insider previously reported, Xu, who was also 39 at the time, was detained by Shangai police a few days after Lin entered a local hospital after experiencing symptoms of poisoning.
Xu is believed to have begun poisoning his colleagues three months after Yozoo brokered a deal with Netflix to adapt Liu Cixin's "Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy.
Ed Miller/Netflix
Per The Times, Lin dropped millions of dollars on the copyrights and licenses connected to the franchise in 2014, the year the first book in the trilogy was translated into English and gained a bevy of new fans, including former president Barack Obama.
He hired Xu, a former lawyer, in 2017, to head a subsidiary of Yoozoo called The Three-Body Universe that held the rights to Mr. Liu's novels.
However, Xu was demoted after less than three years in the role and had his pay slashed due to poor performance, The Times reported, citing Chinese media.
After debuting last month, the Netflix adaptation of "the 3 Body Problem" garnered 11 million viewers in its first four days, according to Deadline.
In her review of the series, BI's Palmer Haasch wrote: "While the show can feel like eight hours of setting up stakes for future battles, those eight hours contain truly great moments of visual spectacle, memorable performances, and ruminations on what it actually means to be human."