Netflix’s VP of Global Public Policy Dean Garfield has issued a firm response to a letter sent to his boss Ted Sarandos this past week by five U.S. Republican senators.
Those senators had issue with the streaming service’s plan for “Game of Thrones” executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to adapt Chinese author Liu Cixin’s sci-fi trilogy “The Three-Body Problem” about humanity’s first contact with an alien civilization.
The problem they see it is that by adapting the work they are “normalizing” the Chinese government’s brutal incarceration of more than one million Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
Now Garfield, in a letter now up at Deadline has politely reminded the legislators in his letter that “Netflix does not operate a service in China” and wanted to make it very clear that just because the author of the book series supports his government’s policy, Netflix or the producers do not.
Garfield says: “Netflix judges individual projects on their merits. Mr. Liu is the author of the book – The Three Body Problem – not the creator of this. We do not agree with his comments, which are entirely unrelated to his book or this Netflix show… Mr. Liu’s comments are not reflective of the views of Netflix or of the show’s creators, nor are they part of the plot or themes of the show.”
The deal is part of Benioff and Weiss’ $300 million overall deal with the company. Brad Pitt’s Plan B, filmmaker Rian Johnson and actress Rosamund Pike have all been connect to the project too, while “True Blood” and “The Terror: Infamy” producer Alexander Woo will write and executive produce.