Former Yoozoo Games Executive Sentenced to Death for Poisoning Company Owner

A former executive who worked at Yoozoo Games, which owns the film rights to Netflix's 3-Body Problem, has been sentenced to death in China.

The sentencing came on Friday after Xu Yao was found guilty of poisoning the food of the company's founder, Lin Qi, in 2020. According to the Shanghai First Intermediate People's Court, the poisoning happened due to a dispute over Yoozoo Games' business operations.

Lin allegedly fell sick after drinking a cup of poisoned pu-erh tea and died about 10 days later. Xu was taken into custody by police shortly after, and he is alleged to have poisoned various beverages in the company office between September and December 2020, as well as poisoning four other people who didn't die.

Yoozoo Games owns the film rights to the best-selling Chinese science fiction trilogy series The Three-Body Problem. The company gave the film rights to Netflix to produce an adaptation that premiered on March 21 and stars Jovan Adepo, John Bradley, Rosalind Chao, Liam Cunningham, Eiza González, and more.

Netflix has yet to greenlight a second season but showrunner David Benioff told Games Radar that they're planning to go foward with one. "If we do get a second season, we'll need to hit the ground running in terms of pre-production and production to get it out to people in some kind of reasonable time," he said.