THE WANDERING EARTH Liu Lang Di Qiu (original title) FILM - COMING TO NETFLIX

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The sun was dying out, people all around the world built giant planet thrusters to move Earth out of its orbit and to sail Earth to a new star system. Yet the 2500 years journey came with unexpected dangers, and in order to save humanity, a group of young people in this age of a wandering Earth came out boldly and fought hard for everyone's survival.  

Director:

 Frant Gwo

Writers:

 Gong Geer, Junce Ye | 

Stars:

 Chuxiao Qu, Jing Wu, Guangjie Li | 

 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7605074/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_wr#writers/

 

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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7605074/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_wr#writers/

The Wandering Earth (2019)

Full Cast & Crew

Directed by 

Frant Gwo

Writing Credits  

Gong Geer
Junce Ye
Yan Dongxu
Frant Gwo
Yang Zhixue
Cixin Liu	...	(story)

Cast (in credits order)  

	Chuxiao Qu	...	Liu Qi
	Jing Wu	...	Liu Peiqiang
	Guangjie Li	...	Wang Lei
	Man-Tat Ng	...	Han Ziang
	Jin Mai Jaho	...	Han Duoduo
	Mike Kai Sui	...	Tim (as Sui Kai)
	Hongchen Li	...	Zhang Xiaoqiang
	Jingjing Qu	...	Zhou Qian
	Yichi Zhang	...	Li Yiyi
	Haoyu Yang	...	He Lianke
	Zhigang Jiang	...	Zhao Zhigang
	Huan Zhang	...	Huang Ming
	Jiayin Lei	...	Yi Ge
	Arkadiy Sharogradskiy	...	Makalov
	Hao Ning	...	Er Shu
	Yi Yang	...	Yang Jie aka Liuzi
Rest of cast listed alphabetically:
	Marvin Bouvet	...	French Resistant
	Yesheng Chen	...	Yi Ge's attendant
	Gong Geer	...	Supply station police A (as Ge'er Gong)
	Hexuan Guo	...	Liu Qi (childhood)
	Zhuozhao Li	...	Liu Qi (youth)
	Yang Lu	...	Security check (scenes deleted)
	Shinichi Takashima	...	Japanese rescue team
	Luoyi Tao	...	Middle school female teacher
	Zhi Wang	...	Liu Qi's mom
	Xiaobei Zhang	...	Rail car driver
	Zixian Zhang	...	Huang Guosheng
	Gianluca Zoppa	...	Astronaut in Space Station

Produced by 

Gong Geer	...	producer
Hong Wang	...	line producer

Music by 

Roc Chen
Tao Liu

Cinematography by 

Michael Liu

Film Editing by 

Ka-Fai Cheung

Second Unit Director or Assistant Director 

Jingxuan Chen

...

second assistant director

 

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Roger Ebert review

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-wandering-earth-2019

 

The Wandering Earth" cured my winter depression. 

Seriously: on opening night, I happily joined a packed Times Square auditorium-full of moviegoers watching this science-fiction adventure, which stars a talented ensemble of of Mandarin-speaking actors trying to stop the Earth from crashing into Jupiter. I left the theater hoping that "The Wandering Earth" would be one of this year's Chinese New Year's hits. It grossed $300 million in China during its opening week alone, a hopeful sign that we'll see more entertainment as assured as this.

The setup might seem familiar at first. Two teams of astronauts fight to save the Earth years after its leaders transformed it into a planet-sized spaceship to escape destruction by an overactive sun. The first team is a two-man skeleton crew: the square-jawed Peiqiang Liu (Jing Wu) and his Russian cosmonaut buddy Makarov (Arkady Sharogradsky). The other is a small exploratory group led by Peiqiang's feisty twentysomething son Qi Liu (Chuxio Qu) and his upbeat partner Duoduo Han (Jinmai Zhao). These factions respectively spend most of their time battling MOSS, an unhelpful computer in a remote space station; and exploring an ice-covered Earth in stolen all-terrain vehicles (some of which bring to mind "Total Recall," specifically the tank-sized drill-cars).

But while director Frant Gwo and his writing team blend Cixin Liu's source novel with elements from American-made sci-fi disaster films—including "Armageddon," "The Day After Tomorrow," and "Sunshine"—they synthesize them in a visually dynamic, emotionally engaging way that sets the project apart from its Western cousins, and marks it as a great and uniquely Chinese science fiction film.

For one thing, rather than build the tale around a lone hero ringed by supporting players, "The Wandering Earth" distributes bravery generously amid an ensemble that includes action hero Wu; rising stars Qu and Zhao; and comedy institution Man-Tat Ng, who plays a grey-bearded spaceman named Zi'ang Ha. The script, credited to a team of six, never valorizes a singular chest-puffing hero, nor does it scapegoat a mustache-twirling antagonist (not even MOSS, the sentient, HAL-9000-style computer program in the space station). 

The teamwork theme is cross-generational, too. Both Peiqiang and Ng (formerly the straight man to film comedy superstar Stephen Chow) are treated with reverence because they're older, and are therefore presumed to have more experience and stronger moral fiber. The veterans work well with the film's younger astronauts, whose optimism makes them as brazen as they are idealistic. 

This apolitical blockbuster about a post-climate-change disaster extends its belief in teamwork to the rest of the international community. The movie is filled with narrative diversions that reassure viewers that no single country's leaders are smarter, more responsible, or more capable than the rest—except, of course, for the Chinese.

 

Second, "The Wandering Earth" looks better than most American special-effects spectaculars because it gives you breathing space to admire landscape shots of a dystopian Earth that suggest old fashioned matte-paintings on steroids. Although Gwo and his team realized their expensive-looking vision with the help of a handful of visual effects studios, including the Weta Workshop, they have somehow blended their many influences in bold, stylish ways that only Hollywood filmmakers like James Cameron and Steven Spielberg have previously managed.  

Third, the film's creators breathe new life into hackneyed tropes. Gwo and his team take a little extra time to show off the laser beams, steering wheels, and hydraulic joints on their space cars and exoskeleton suits, to make the gear seem unique. And the storytelling goes extra mile to show viewers the emotional stress and natural obstacles that the characters must overcome while solving scientifically credible dilemmas (all vetted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences). This movie may not be the next "2001: A Space Odyssey," but it's everything "2010: The Year We Make Contact" should have been (and I like "2010," a lot).

A week after seeing "The Wandering Earth," I'm still marveling at how good it is. I can't think of another recent computer-graphics-driven blockbuster that left me feeling this giddy because of its creators' can-do spirit and consummate attention to detail. The future is here, and it is nerve-wracking, gorgeous, and Chinese.

 

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youtube video review of just the movie

 

 

A political discussion of the movie

 

 

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Viewer Reviews copied from google   You have to slide to ge to the right margin

 

Chen Lawrence

a week ago

(Trying really hard not to spoil too much)
The wandering earth is absolutely great, but the caption might be too fast for English speaker and some actors are unfitting for their role. Those who are saying the film telling stuff like China is great can give up that try. The best part of this film is more than just its fast-paced storyline and visual effects, it is the display of different culture and internationalist spirit within it. While such display of different cultural beauties is another r ...MORE

Helpful? • 203 people found this helpful.

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Young Shway

a week ago

I’ve read the novel since I was young, I’d say the film is quite different from its original novel, although with the same background. Many people say it’s portraying a different culture than Hollywood films, well, in some extent, it tried, it elaborated international cooperation rather than individualism, which is good. But on the other hand,it still fell in the track of individualism by  letting couple of individuals save the whole world, not completely differing itself from Hollywood yet.  Sp ...MORE

Helpful? • 21 people found this helpful.

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James Y

6 days ago

Loved the film, some small things to fix here and there, especially CGI quality, in some of the Overhead shots of the mining truck felt a bit choppy and poorly rendered. 

Some people might think the characters were a bit "underdeveloped" but the majority of viewers in my session picked up the jist of the story & character progression just fine. Other sync errors involving some of the foreign characters speech really makes me appreciate the effort that some Korean productions (My Way 2011, Steel ...MORE

Helpful? • 19 people found this helpful.

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Yu Ma

a week ago

I read wandering earth when I was a curious high school kid 16 years ago. Liu Cixin, the author of Wandering Earth and Three Body Problem, inspired me to look into the stars for answers amidst mind-numbing mediocrity of a mountainous village in China.

Watching the story play out on the screen has been a deja vu for me. Wandering Earth, despite hints of CCP propaganda, manages to reveal the depth of Chinese philosophy -- a heartbreaking attachment to the land, seeing Earth not as a disposable ha ...MORE

Helpful? • 70 people found this helpful.

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Vicky Mao

3 days ago

It’s absolutely a must-see movie of this year. Love the visual effect and the fast-pacing storyline. In fact, it is a completely new story from the original fiction but the talented director, along with the help from the producer, who is also the author of the original fiction and the award-winning SiFi fiction “The Three Body Problem”, transformed a simple story into a breath-taking journey under the setting of a futuristic apocalypse. You do NOT want to leave your seat during the entire watch. ...MORE

Helpful? • 1 person found this helpful.

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DD L

3 days ago

I give 9/10 for visual effects but 5/10 for the story. The idea is to sacrifice half populations for saving the earth is doubtful. The story line was very ambiguous in details. There were lots gaps between scenes to connect. I guess it is because the limitation of length to force the editing cuts. Hopefully, we see a director cut edition later. The nationalism is there for sure but not that obvious which is an improvement from other blockbusters they've made before. 
However, none of these defec ...MORE

Helpful? • 2 people found this helpful.

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SugaKookiesandTae :3

3 days ago

This movie is really great. Subtitles might be a little fast but I can understand mandarian throughly so I’m not in the position to say that its too slow or fast. Translations are fairly well done, though a little bit doesn’t catch the chinese slang, it still gets the point of it out though.

Its a really cool and eyecatching film, a bit different from the original novel, but its still extremely intresting. Younger kids maybe under 9 ish wouldn’t really understand what’s going on though.. 

Over ...MORE

Helpful? • 1 person found this helpful.

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Di Liu

a week ago

As a Chinese who studied in US(as a matter of fact i came to US because of Movie industry and NBA) and recently check this film during the traditional Chinese spring festival. 

I am standing in an objective view to highly recommend this film for the people who is interested in this. 

Not only its the first film close to TOP level of Hollywood filM (like Martian, Independence Day, Interstellar) from emotionally and story telling, CG need to be improve but at least 80% close to the current level ...MORE

Helpful? • 8 people found this helpful.

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Matt G

5 days ago

Enjoyable, fast paced and full of action. The visuals are gorgeous and design work is very good. 

People died and I just didn't care because they were underdeveloped and there are just too many "just in time" moments.

Some of the subtitles are hard to see because of snow shots but overall its enjoyable and worth a watch.

Glad to see something challenging Hollywood's dominance.

Helpful? • 7 people found this helpful.

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Chun C. Li

a week ago

The movie is the first big budget Chinese SciFi epic and I say that it is an impressive success and a prelude to a new exciting genre from China. Specific to this movie, I find it satisfying on several levels: visually stunning, great rhythm and pace, good story and imaginative big cosmic scale sci-fi that is the signature of its celebrated author Liu Cixin. The Chinese dialogue is witty and full of irony, but the English subtitle misses most of it. It is for times moving emotionally and has a n ...MORE

Helpful? • 15 people found this helpful.

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Jerry Y

5 days ago

7/10. 
The best directing and CG from a Chinese production, and definitely a bang for the buck, considering its budget a lot smaller than many Hollywood counterparts.
However, the plot has typical Chinese movie sappiness and "just-in-time" coincidences; the humor is a bit cringy; characters are sometimes so underdeveloped that when they die I simply didn't give a s*. 
Overall, great movie, nice entertainment, but not watching a second time, don't expect too much.

Helpful? • 1 person found this helpful.

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Jeremy Larsen

a week ago

Visually stunning, but that's it. If we are comparing this movie to other Chinese made movies, it sets a new bar. Compared to Hollywood it still needs some work. 

I LOVE sci-fi, and while I love what this movie was trying to be, it didn't make it by a longshot. 

Massive gaps in logic, weak and confusing plot, and spends most of the movie trying to make people weep. For an English speaker, following the subtitles is near impossible as they don't stay on the screen long enough to be read, and if ...MORE

Helpful? • 89 people found this helpful.

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Roselyle Zhao

6 days ago

Weak plot, I can only see fragments...
Perhaps it's the editing problem.
Hope the director cut can be much appreciated. 

I don't see why people keep bragging about it. I believe the plot is one main thing when we talk about a movie. 
I admit the visual effects are impressive, especially as in this small budget. 
Communism sipirit was pretty decent. 

IT IS THE BEST CHINESE SCI-FI MOVIE, only because there was no any sci-fi movies being produced there before.

Helpful? • 4 people found this helpful.

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boun sayasy

a week ago

Got to catch the movie on opening night, at the real IMAX 3d @ Irvine Spectrum, not the faked IMAX @ the three alphabet letter chain theatre. The visual is stunning. The 3d is very good. The storyline is so so, a little sappy like Armageddon. A mix of interstellar & Gravity all in one. Highly entertaining overall. Love it!!  OH, if you are not used to watching movie with subtitles, you might have a very different opinion.

Helpful? • 23 people found this helpful.

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Matt Graham

a week ago

This movie is worth watching. I hope that Chinese cinema continues to produce such enjoyable movies. 

The story is intriguing and the visuals were beautiful. There were even a few moving moments. However, some of the character portrayals and a few too many heartfelt moments bordered on cringy. The subtitles were also too fast.

I think it had wide appeal in English speaking countries. Its a shame nobody knows about it!

Helpful? • 10 people found this helpful.

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Chris Danby

2 days ago

I knew nothing of this film other than it was a science fiction Chinese movie with English subtitles. My first impression was that it would be better classified as a disaster film. The science was comic book stuff and the noise and special effects were relentless. Every possible Hollywood thud crunch and slam thrown out without subtlety. Some reviews have written about the cultural issues, again comic book rubbish with no risks or originality. An overly long cluttered noisey boring cliche of a f ...MORE

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Shuang Xu

a week ago

The film is of great significance to Chinese film industry. It's box office success signifies the birth of Chinese big-buget sci-fi sector of film industry. However, due to the lack of sufficient explanation and the looseness in scientific details, as a hard sci-fi venture, the wandering earth project has failed. Nonetheless, many flaws of the project attribute to the grand plan by Liu Cixin for this new section of the film industry. Many cast members are not top actors, and the production compa ...MORE

Helpful? • 2 people found this helpful.

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D Lat

a week ago

Exciting, heartwarming and stays reasonably true to scientific principles. The movie switches from human scale - life underground to the astronomic scale and gave us plenty to talk after watching about regarding the plot dilemmas. It was encouraging to see everyone working together from different nations. I want to see it again, as there's a lot of detail. Five stars!

Helpful? • 1 person found this helpful.

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Jialiang Guo

a week ago

The visual effect of this film is STUNNING! However, like many have noticed, that’s all about it. It’s a great leap for Chinese Sci-fi film but only from the technical perspective, the core, the story, is really bad. There are many logic gap, and the character performance some of them is just awkward. Overall I would give the film like a 6/10, mainly due to its visual effect.

Helpful? • 4 people found this helpful.

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Fabian Azofeifa

a week ago

(3d version)
    So glad to see the chinese fellows with big ambition, hope to see them improve more, I watched this movie from 3d chinese cinema...
   Now... The movie turned to be a  little bit exhauting...
 I am not chinese-maybe I don't get along that well with the cultural trend of acting style and jokes, but I think some actors are not balancing their acting; over acting, cringy jokes...

Helpful? • 4 people found this helpful.

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https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/9/18218479/the-wandering-earth-review-film-china-first-science-fiction-blockbuster-cixin-liu-gravity-the-core

gorgeous, and goofy

The country’s first big-budget science fiction epic is often familiar, but it does spectacle on an impressive scale

By Tasha Robinson  Feb 9, 2019, 3:50pm EST

 

Photo: AMC Theaters

We’re living through a fascinating era of rapid change for the blockbuster movie model. America producers, eager to get their $200 million movies into the lucrative Chinese market, are increasingly looking for Chinese production partners, shooting in Chinese locations, and adding China-friendly characters and plotlines to American movies, even including extra scenes just for the Chinese cuts of films. But simultaneously, China and other countries are moving toward the blockbuster model themselves, creating homegrown films that don’t need to involve American partners at all.

And just as American films attempt to find paydays in foreign markets, foreign blockbusters are coming to America. The Wandering Earth, described as China’s first big-budget science fiction thriller, quietly made it onto screens at AMC theaters in North America this weekend, and it shows a new side of Chinese filmmaking — one focused toward futuristic spectacles rather than China’s traditionally grand, massive historical epics. At the same time, The Wandering Earth feels like a throwback to a few familiar eras of American filmmaking. While the film’s cast, setting, and tone are all Chinese, longtime science fiction fans are going to see a lot on the screen that reminds them of other movies, for better or worse.

The film, based on a short story by Three-Body Problem author Cixin Liu, lays out a crisis of unprecedented proportions: the sun has become unstable, and within a hundred years, it will expand to consume Earth. Within 300, the entire solar system will be gone. Earth’s governments rally and unite to face the problem, and come up with a novel solution: they speckle the planet with 10,000 gigantic jets, and blast it out of its orbit and off on a hundred-generation journey to a new home 4.2 light-years away. The idea is to use Jupiter’s gravitational well to pick up speed for the trip, but a malfunction of the Earth Engine system leaves the planet caught in Jupiter’s gravity, and gradually being pulled toward destruction. A frantic group of workers have to scramble to reactivate the jets and correct the Earth’s course.

The action takes place in two arenas simultaneously. On the Earth’s frigid surface, self-proclaimed genius Liu Qi (Qu Chuxiao) and his younger adopted sister Han Duoduo (Zhao Jinmai) get roped into the rescue efforts after they run away from home. Han is just curious to see the planet’s surface — most of humanity now lives in crowded underground cities, and the surface is for workers only — but Liu Qi is nursing a deeper grudge against his astronaut father Liu Peiqiang (longtime martial-arts movie star Wu Jing) and grandfather (Ng Man-tat, whom Western audiences might recognize from Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer). When Liu Qi was a child, his father moved to a newly-built international space station, designed to move ahead of Earth as a guide and pathfinder. Now an adult, Liu Qi feels his father abandoned him, and wants to strike out independently.

Meanwhile, on the space station, Liu Peiqiang is ironically a day away from completing his 17-year tour of duty and returning to Earth and his family when the crisis hits. The station’s artificial intelligence, MOSS, insists on putting the station’s personnel in hibernation to save energy, but Liu Peiqiang realizes the computer has a secret agenda, and he and a Russian cosmonaut set out to defy it.

The entire space plot may feel suspiciously familiar to American audiences, who have a strong emotional touchstone when it comes to a calm-voiced computer in space telling a desperate astronaut that it can’t obey his orders, even when human lives are on the line, because it has orders of its own. MOSS even looks something like the HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey: it’s represented as a red light on a gimbled panel, like a single unblinking, judgmental red eye. But a good deal of Liu Peiqiang’s space adventure also plays out like a sequence from Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 Oscar-winner Gravity, with dizzying sequences of astronauts trying to navigate clouds of debris and find handholds on a treacherous moving station while tumbling through space.

Meanwhile, the Earthside half of the mission resembles nothing so much as the 2003 nonsense-thriller The Core, about a team trying to drill their way to the center of the Earth to set the planet’s core spinning again. As with that film, Liu Qi and Han are part of a group trying to restart a failed system, and encountering most of their obstacles just in the attempt to get to the problem site. They pick up a few distinctive allies along the way, including biracial Chinese-Australian gadabout Tim (viral video star Mike Sui), but mostly, the characters are drawn as blandly and broadly as in any American action movie, and a fair number of them get killed along the journey without ever having developed enough personality for audiences to feel the loss.

Pretty much any flaw The Wandering Earth can claim — flashy action scenes without much substance, a marked bent toward sticky sentimentality, an insistently pushy score that demands emotional response from the audience at every given moment — are familiar flaws from past blockbusters. Where the film really stands out, though, is in its eye for grandiose spectacle. Director Frant Gwo gives the film a surprising stateliness, especially in the scenes of the mobile Earth wandering the cosmos, wreathed in tiny blue jets that leave eerie space-contrails behind. His attention to detail is marvelous — in scenes where characters stand on Earth’s surface, contemplating Jupiter’s malicious beauty, the swirling colors of the Great Red Spot are clearly visible in reflections in their suit helmets.

 

No matter how familiar the plot beats feel, that level of attention not just to functional special effects, but to outright beauty, makes The Wandering Earth memorable. Not every CGI sequence is aesthetically impeccable — sequences like a vehicle chase through a frozen Shanghai sometimes look brittle and false. But everything having to do with Jupiter, Earth as seen from space, and the space station subplot is visually sumptuous. This is frequently a gorgeously rendered film, with an emphasis on intimidating space vistas that will look tremendous on IMAX screens.

And while the constant attempts to flee the destructive power of changing weather have their own echoes in past films, from The Day After Tomorrow to 2012, Gwo mostly keeps the action tight and propulsive. The Wandering Earth is frequently breathless, though the action occasionally gets a little muddled in editing. At times, particularly on the surface scenes where everyone is wearing identical pressure suits, it can be easy to lose track of which character is where. It’s often easy to feel that Gwo cares more about the collective rescue project than about any individual character — potentially a value that will work better for Chinese audiences than American viewers, who are looking for a single standout hero to root for.

But the film’s biggest strengths are in its quieter moments, where Gwo takes the time to contemplate Jupiter’s gravity well slowly deepening its pull on Earth’s atmosphere, or Liu Qi staring up, awestruck, at the gas giant dwarfing his home. In those chilly sequences, the film calls back to an older tradition of slower science fiction, in epic-scale classics like 1951’s When Worlds Collide or 1956’s Forbidden Planet. The interludes are brief, but they’re a welcome respite from chase sequences and destruction.

The Wandering Earth gets pretty goofy at times, with jokes about Tim’s heritage, or Liu Qi’s inexperienced driving and overwhelming arrogance, or with high-speed banter over an impossibly long technical manual that no one has time to digest in the middle of an emergency. At times, the humor is even a little dry, as when MOSS responds to Liu Peiqiang’s repeated rebellions with a passive-aggressive “Will all violators stop contact immediately with Earth?” But Gwo finds time for majesty as well, and makes a point of considering the problem on a global scale, rather than just focusing on the few desperate strivers who’ve tied the Earth’s potential destruction into their own personal issues.

 

Much like the Russian space blockbuster Salyut-7 was a fascinating look into the cultural differences between American films and their Russian equivalents, The Wandering Earthfeels like a telling illustration of the similarities and differences between Chinese and American values. Gwo’s film is full of images and moments that will be familiar to American audiences, and it has an equally familiar preoccupation with the importance of family connections, and the nobility of sacrifice. But it also puts a strong focus on global collective action, on the need for international cooperation, and for the will of the group over the will of the individual.

None of these things will be inherently alien to American viewers, who may experience The Wandering Earth as a best-of mash-up of past science fiction films, just with less-familiar faces in the lead roles. But as China gets into the action-blockbuster business, it’ll continue to be fascinating to see how the country brings its own distinctive voices and talents into a global market. The Wandering Earth feels like the same kind of projects American filmmakers are making — accessible, thrill-focused, and at least somewhat generic, in an attempt to go down easy with any audience. But there’s enough specific personality in it to point to a future of more nationally inflected blockbusters. Once every country is making would-be international crossovers, the strongest appeal may come from the most distinctive, personal visions with the most to say about the cultures they come from.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/21/18234819/netflix-the-wandering-earth-china-science-fiction-blockbuster-cixin-liu-film

China’s blockbuster The Wandering Earth is coming to Netflix

China’s first major science fiction epic has become its second-biggest film release, earning more than $600 million

By Andrew Liptak@AndrewLiptak  Feb 21, 2019, 12:34pm EST

 

Netflix has acquired the streaming rights for The Wandering Earth, China’s first science fiction blockbuster, which has earned more than $600 million in theaters since its release during the Chinese New Year.

Based on a novelette by Three-Body Problem author Cixin Liu, the film follows a worldwide effort to move the Earth away from the sun after scientists discover it will soon expand and destroy humanity’s solar system. As the planet approaches Jupiter to slingshot out of the system and out to Proxima Centauri, a group of characters struggles to restart Earth’s failing transport engines and save Earth from being dragged into the gas giant’s gravity well and engulfed.

Late last year, Chinese author and screenwriter Anna Wu described science fiction as “a new challenge for the Chinese film industry,” given the complexities and audience expectations of such productions. Thus far, The Wandering Earth has been a major hit in China, becoming the country’s second-highest grossing film of all time. But despite the success at home, the film has had limited releases elsewhere in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. With Netflix acquiring the film, it’ll reach a much wider audience, raising the profile of the movie and the Chinese film industry.

Netflix hasn’t said when the film will hit its platform, and Deadline reports that The Wandering Earth will be available in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Korea. Ironically, it won’t be available in China, as Netflix doesn’t operate there; local streaming service, Youku, will handle the film domestically.