The 25th Shanghai International Film Festival Sci-Fi Week began on Sunday, gathering many sci-fi moviemakers, directors and practitioners. They looked back at the history of Chinese sci-fi film development, offered proposals for the industry and expressed their expectations for the future.

Although China's sci-fi film industry only welcomed its flourishing period in the wake of the "The Wandering Earth" films, which aroused public enthusiasm for the genre and garnered record box office revenues in 2019 and 2023 respectively, the industry in China has a history of nearly a century.  

The sci-fi genre's story in China began with the German silent film "Metropolis" directed by Fritz Lang, which was introduced to China in 1929, which marked the first time many people in the country had seen a sci-fi movie. The film tells a story set in vision of the year 2000 in a futuristic city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners, where the son of the city's mastermind falls in love with a working-class prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences. 

Ten years later, China's first sci-fi film "Visiting Shanghai After 60 Years" made its debut, depicting a world in 1998 when people are not identified by names anymore but rather numbers, cars can fly in the sky and the weather can be controlled. The film is a depiction of the creators' imagination of the future, but most of its ideas have not been fulfilled in reality. 

In 1963, China's first "hard-core" sci-fi film was screened. Though the half-an-hour "Little Sun" tells a very simple story – several teens created a second sun to help humans get rid of coldness – the concept they used to create a sun, the antimatter annihilation, helped China make a breakthrough in an artificial sun device: EAST in 2017, with an ultimate goal of solving the energy crisis. Many details that appeared in the movie decades ago have come to fruition, such as a robot at a science center that can greet guests, self-driving vehicles, and suspension monorail. 

In the 1980s, the sci-fi film industry reached a new high in China and several works triggered hot discussion in society and mass viewing at cinemas of movies such as "Dead Coral Island," "Dislocation" and "Wonder Boy." In "Dead Coral Island," a scientist defeats a vicious power with laser weapons. In "Dislocation," an engineer creates a replica humanoid robot of himself to help with heavy workloads; however, the robot gradually develops his own thoughts and deliberately makes trouble in order to replace the hero. In despair, the engineer presses the "destroy" button to detonate the robot. "Wonder Boy" is a popular children's film telling a story of a boy whose hands can generate electricity and who causes much trouble in his life. Finally the boy gets rid of the electricity.

However, after a two-decade prosperous period, China's sci-fi film industry reached a bottom with very few works made, and the few made having little impact. This was until "The Wandering Earth" hit cinemas in 2019 and generated a box office of over 4.6 billion yuan ($642 million) in the Chinese mainland and $5.97 million in North America. Four years later, "The Wandering Earth II" continued creating a craze among film lovers with a final box office of around four billion yuan ($559 million). 

As China's first space-based science fiction blockbuster, "The Wandering Earth" series is a milestone in film history. It describes a story in a distant future when the Earth is about to be devoured owing to the sun expanding into a red giant. The upcoming peril forces people around the world to build thousands of massive rocket thrusters at certain spots on the Earth to separate the entire planet from the solar system. With new breakthroughs in visual effects and storytelling, the film showcases China's rapidly developing capabilities in the film-making industry and overall development in manufacturing and scientific research.