Chinese film faces final frontier

Domestically-produced sci-fi movies are seeking to make the genre work at the country's box office, starting with Lunar New Year release of The Wandering Earth, Xu Fan reports.

Despite holding its own as the world's second-largest film market for seven years, China has yet to shape a functional system to produce sci-fi blockbusters, a genre that has been led by Hollywood for more than half a century.

However, some industry insiders and critics hope that The Wandering Earth, an upcoming epic adapted from Liu Cixin's novella of the same title, will become the game changer in this regard.