Trivia

The story is based on Hugo Award winning novelist Cixin Liu's novel of the same name.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Wandering Earth is China's "first full-scale interstellar" film. Chinese science fiction author and screenwriter Anna Wu says science fiction "is a new challenge for the Chinese film industry." While there have been numerous fantasy films, she told The Verge that studios and investors have hesitated when it comes to the genre because of the perception that they need both a high level of special effects and to rake in lots of money in order to be successful

Many may question the idea of moving the entire Earth rather than building some big spaceships. Actually as the novel originally tells, the United States proposed to build big spaceships to send mankind to settle in the new solar system. However, only the wealthy elites may get onboard due to space restraint. A ticket cost more than 30 million dollars. This plan got shot down during a huge civil unrest after word leaked out that people who can't pay 30 million dollars will be left to die. China and the rest of the world proposed to build giant engines to move the entire planet as we saw in the movie. Another consideration as mentioned in the novel is that risks for spaceships to sustain a biosphere for 2,500 years are too high.

Originally Wu Jing, one of the protagonist, only agreed to show up in one scene, but since he was the only big star of the film, the director Frant changed the script and kept putting him in more and more scenes. One day of shooting became weeks, then months. Wu jing's pay for each movie is around 10 million us dollars. After weeks of shooting, the director asked him that, since the movie was over-budget, maybe he didn't mind not getting paid. Wu jing loved the director and the film so much, not only that he agreed not getting paid, he invested his own money of about 9 million us dollars in it. Many people thought Wu Jing was conned by the director at that time. In fact, without Wu's name, the movie wouldn't have been sold to so many theaters at all. If director Frant is the father of the film, Wu Jing is like its guardian angel. This kind of blessing rarely happened in Chinese film industry.

Chinese movie industry had contacted some famous directors: James Cameron, Luc Besson, Alfonso... to name a few. All rejected the proposal. The job eventually landed on a not-so-famous director Frant Gwo, who was most passionate about the original story. Gwo and his colleagues wrote an outline of 25,000 words, which was way above normal. They spent 6 months together, working day and night, writing then rewriting the draft. In the end the draft alone has one million words. Each character you see in the film has detail background and stories.