THOUGH the coming heyday of China-made sci-fi blockbusters has been a failed prophesy for years, a new movie adaptation of a novel by Hugo Award winner Liu Cixin has once again buoyed expectations among China’s sci-fi lovers and cinemagoers.

“The Wandering Earth,” scheduled to hit Chinese screens next February, has left critics wondering whether it will usher in a new era of big-budget, hard-core and domestically developed sci-fi movies.

The film, directed by Guo Fan and adapted from Liu’s 2000 short story of the same name, drew questions on whether China’s movie industry and the market is ready for it.

Gong Ge’er, the producer of the film, says they do not want the film to be a copycat of every other Hollywood blockbuster.

“We hope the plot, characters and scenes in the film can impress our audience as being Chinese, as this is a very Chinese story,” he said.

The official trailer has offered a glimpse into the film’s many futuristic scenes, including a frozen “2044 Shanghai Olympic Mansion” and a huge Earth Engine towering over the Great Wall.

“Westerners may be surprised by the idea of humans leaving with the Earth instead of fleeing in spacecraft. What they may see in this film is the Chinese dedication to the land, as nurtured in the country’s long agricultural history,” Gong said.

China boasts the world’s second-largest film market, with a box office reaching 55.9 billion yuan (US$8.05 billion) in 2017. As a high-grossing film genre, sci-fi movies in China are mostly Hollywood imports, prompting an outcry for Chinese sci-fi blockbusters.

“I love movies like ‘Interstellar,’ but I also expect to see Chinese faces and stories in a sci-fi blockbuster,” said Tan Yuming, a 21-year-old finance major at Shenzhen University and sci-fi fan.

Industry observers have attributed the scarcity of China-made sci-fi films to the low industrialization level in China’s movie industry, which pushes up the cost of everything from spacecraft interior to spacesuit props, a lack of experience of sci-fi movie making and uncertainties in a market spoiled by imported sci-fi films.

It is widely hoped that adaptations of works from world-famous sci-fi writers like Liu will be trailblazers for future Chinese sci-fi blockbusters.