Cameras roll in Budapest — and on the finale plan

Netflix didn’t just restart production on its sci‑fi gamble — it went all in. Filming on seasons 2 and 3 of 3 Body Problem season 2 is underway in Budapest after a move from the U.K., with the streamer shooting both chapters back-to-back to keep momentum and cut the dead time fans hate. The aim is simple: finish Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy on screen with no long stall between releases.

The move is a strategic one. Hungary’s production scene offers large soundstages, deep local crews, and a well-known rebate program that can shave meaningful costs off a show built on heavy sets and even heavier VFX. Budapest also gives the team flexible locations within a short drive — glass-and-steel cityscapes, riverfronts, forests, and military-scale backlots — which helps when a story jumps across timelines, continents, and space.

Cameras began rolling in July 2025, a little over a year after Netflix used its spring 2024 Upfront to confirm the series would run through to its planned conclusion. The creators — David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo — have said the material they most wanted to adapt sits in the next two installments. Season 1 covered most of the first book; the remaining two books demand bigger scale, denser science, and sequences you can’t fake without time and money.

Netflix’s confidence didn’t come out of nowhere. In the first half of 2024, the show tallied 388.10 million viewing hours worldwide, ranking eighth overall for that period on the platform. For a talky, brainy space epic, that’s a big result — the kind of number that lets executives lock in multi-season plans, book soundstages months ahead, and commit to a long VFX runway.

Back-to-back production is the other piece of the plan. Shooting seasons 2 and 3 in one continuous block lets the team reuse sets, props, costumes, and CG asset libraries without mothballing them for a year. It also keeps key cast and department heads in sync, which matters when you’re telling a story that hinges on cause-and-effect across decades. Expect season 2 to arrive in late 2026 after a long post-production stretch, with the finale season following after that.

Budapest gives the team scale and continuity. Large facilities such as the city’s major studios are built to handle parallel units — a must when you’re staging lab sequences one day and deep-space shots the next. While Netflix hasn’t listed its vendor lineup, the show will lean on a global VFX network and a shared workflow set during season 1, with previs, motion capture, and virtual production tools shaping shots before a camera even moves.

Cost isn’t the only driver. The post-strike production crunch has crowded the U.K.’s biggest stages and crews. By shifting to Central Europe, the series sidesteps bottlenecks, holds onto dates, and keeps its delivery window realistic for a VFX-first drama. That continuity is what lets the creative team plan two seasons as one story instead of two disconnected shoots.

What the next chapters promise

What the next chapters promise

No spoilers here, but readers of Liu Cixin’s books know where things go next. The Dark Forest and Death’s End push the chessboard way beyond Earth. The logic of deterrence, the psychology of civilizations facing extinction, and the cold math of survival all take center stage. It’s bigger and bleaker, but also strangely human — people making impossible calls with the universe watching.

Translating that to TV means grappling with hard science ideas and time jumps, then keeping it watchable. Season 1 turned abstract physics and a virtual game into character-driven TV. Seasons 2 and 3 will have to do the same with concepts like long-range strategy, clandestine plans that play out over decades, and the fallout of first contact. That’s where the back-to-back shoot matters: the details planted in season 2 need to pay off a year later without feeling like a reset.

The creative team has also been clear about continuity. Season 1 blended original characters with reimagined roles from the novels. That flexibility gives the writers options as they compress hundreds of pages into hours of television. Netflix hasn’t shared a full returning cast list yet, but viewers should expect familiar faces alongside new players tied to the next phase of the story — including figures central to Earth’s long game against a superior force.

Set-piece wise, this stretch of the saga demands a different toolkit. Think less dusty mystery and more aerospace, deep-time engineering, and spacefaring tension. That could mean larger practical builds for labs and command centers, more complex crowd simulations, and specialized effects for vast structures and zero‑G movement. Virtual production — LED walls, real-time rendering — is likely to be a bigger part of the mix to keep location days manageable and previews sharper.

There’s also a business angle. Netflix has spent the past few years chasing loyalty on multi-season genre shows. Committing to a true endgame, and saying so early, sends a signal to viewers burned by abrupt cancellations: this story will stick the landing. The viewing numbers back that bet, and the production plan — a continuous shoot, a locked location, overlapping teams — gives the show a cleaner path to delivery than season 1 had.

Expect a long post for season 2. Finish photography, animation, simulation, lighting, compositing, sound design, ADR, and score all stack up on a show like this. Twelve to fourteen months of post is normal for space-heavy TV, and that’s before localization and QC in dozens of languages. Shooting the two seasons together helps vendors stay staffed and saves the time lost when you spin a pipeline down and start it up again.

What should fans watch for next? A few milestones will tell you how smoothly things are moving:

  • Official cast grid: who’s back and who’s new for the next phase.
  • Episode count and titles: a hint at how the books are being sliced.
  • First-look images from Budapest stages: sets, suits, and ships.
  • VFX sizzle or teaser: usually signals post is locking in.

Season 1 proved there’s an audience for high-concept sci-fi that doesn’t talk down to you. With cameras rolling in Hungary, a two-season plan locked, and the heaviest lifts still ahead, the show is now chasing something rarer: a complete adaptation of a modern sci-fi classic, delivered at scale, on time, and without blinking.