The Massive Fandom the Whole Country Follows: Why Does It Cause Such an Uproar Every Time It Airs?

This article is authorized for reprint from “Animation Academic Club” (动画学术趴).

​Author / pipi

“Rather than retelling that era of history, each iteration of the Three Kingdoms uses it as a mirror reflecting how the current generation understands meaning.”

“A grieving army is bound to win, a victorious army is bound to grow arrogant, an arrogant army is bound to be defeated, and a defeated army is bound to grieve.”

If you have scrolled through any Three Kingdoms-related Bilibili videos lately, chances are you have encountered this phrase.

It doesn't come from The Art of War, nor is it a summary by any historian—it is a (suspected) piece of “rules creepypasta” distilled by netizens from the 2010 TV drama Three Kingdoms (commonly known as “New Three” or “Niu San”).

Similar memes include the “Soul-Chain Binding Mechanism,” “Two people plotting in secret will inevitably be eavesdropped on,” and “Unconfirmed life-or-death status is ruled as death”—none of which sound like discussions about a historical drama.

Yet, New Three Kingdoms is far from the most outrageous adaptation in Three Kingdoms history.

San Guo Sha long ago compressed Zhuge Liang into two lines of skill descriptions; Koihime†Musou gender-swapped the entire cast without stopping anyone from recognizing who was who; Ya Boy Kongming! had the grand strategist travel through time to a Tokyo nightclub to help an underground idol gain followers; and from last year to the year after next, three animated films—The Starry Sky of Three Kingdoms, Light Chaser's Three Kingdoms: Part One, and Zhao Zilong—have already hit or will soon hit theaters. Barely any of these versions resemble each other, yet every single one believes it is telling the Three Kingdoms story.

Rather than continuing to debate what a “proper” Three Kingdoms adaptation should look like, this article aims to explore: Why does the Three Kingdoms subject matter attract so many wildly disparate reinterpretations? Why can all these contradictory, even mutually exclusive versions hold their heads high and claim to be the Three Kingdoms—without a single one ever truly replacing the others?

01 The Three Kingdoms for Serious Minds: What Do We Mean When We Say “Respecting the Original”?​

If we were to pick a “standard” Three Kingdoms, the 1994 CCTV drama Romance of the Three Kingdoms is probably the least controversial answer.

Of course, anyone with a bit of knowledge knows that Romance of the Three Kingdoms is not equivalent to actual Three Kingdoms history—Luo Guanzhong carried out extensive literary rewrites and made distinct, opinionated choices based on Chen Shou's Records of the Three Kingdoms. Yet this did not shake the novel's position in folk culture in the slightest.

From folk legends during the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties to the popularity of “storytelling of the Three Kingdoms” in the Song Dynasty, and on to the strong sense of dynastic legitimacy among Han literati in the Yuan Dynasty alongside the popular worship of figures like Guan Yu, the emotional preference for honoring Shu and deprecating Wei accumulated over nearly a thousand years. What Luo Guanzhong did was systematically gather this sentiment into a single novel. After centuries of transmission, this version of the Three Kingdoms had long taken deep root in people's minds, becoming the serious, orthodox, and “standard” Three Kingdoms narrative for the vast majority. The 1994 TV series remained highly faithful to this version and visualized it with extraordinary craftsmanship, further cementing its place in the public consciousness.

The show single-handedly established the visual perception of Three Kingdoms figures for generations to come—Tang Guoqiang's Zhuge Liang, Bao Guo'an's Cao Cao, Sun Yanjun's Liu Bei. For a very long time, these faces were practically synonymous with the names themselves.

The 2009 animated series Romance of the Three Kingdoms was an extension of this orthodox lineage aimed at younger audiences.

This Sino-Japanese co-produced animation featured a realistic art style, incorporating plenty of family-friendly adaptations while staying highly faithful to the original work. For many younger viewers, this was their primer on the Three Kingdoms—they started with the animation, then went back to watch the 1994 TV series, or even opened the original novel. In a sense, it passed the understanding of the Three Kingdoms established by the 1994 version down to the next generation.

However, the 1994 version was not merely a slavish copy of the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. For instance, it gave Cao Cao a more three-dimensional portrayal than the original text; the magnanimity in Short Song Style coexisted with his raw ambition atop the Bronze Sparrow Terrace. This elevated him beyond a flat, villainous minister framed solely by the “honor Shu, disparage Wei” dogma, making him closer to a flesh-and-blood hero-villain.

Yet this adaptation still operated on the premise of preserving the core themes of the novel—Cao Cao could be more complex, but his many actions were still framed as usurpations.

Where, then, did the 1994 version's “orthodoxy” come from? At its root, it operated within a logic centered around “legitimate title and moral standing” (mingfen).

In fact, the legitimacy of political power and moral justification (mingfen) is an inescapable core issue throughout Three Kingdoms history (as well as its many adaptations and dramatizations).

Cao Cao claimed he was “upholding the Son of Heaven to command the insubordinate,” while his rivals called it “holding the Son of Heaven hostage to command the feudal lords”—a few words' difference completely flipped the nature of the same act. Liu Bei repeatedly emphasized his descent from Prince Jing of Zhongshan because bloodline conferred innate legitimacy under the Han legal tradition. Sun Quan held sway over Eastern Wu; possessing the flimsiest foundation of legitimacy, he was the last to declare himself emperor and acted far more cautiously.

In the context of the Three Kingdoms, who a person is depends not only on what they do, but on whether they can provide an accepted moral title (mingfen) for their actions—and once that title stands, it provides moral shelter for those actions in return.

In the novel and the 1994 TV series, Shu Han, with its declared mission to “restore the Han Dynasty” and “treat the people with benevolence,” was viewed as the regime with the highest moral legitimacy (the embodiment of “loyalty”). Consequently, all characters were ranked and measured along a “loyal versus treacherous” spectrum anchored by Shu Han. This is why, even when Guan Yu was defeated at Maicheng, viewers and readers still empathized with him and mourned his loss; conversely, the “unification of the Three Kingdoms under the Jin Dynasty,” which brought an end to wartime chaos, left people with a lingering sense of melancholy.

So-called “orthodoxy” is not an objective attribute, but an ingrained preconception. Ultimately, the battle for narrative authority over the Three Kingdoms in later generations is the exact same thing as the historical figures fighting for political legitimacy—the stage simply shifted from imperial courts to printed pages and screens.

And in 2010, a production attempted to directly challenge this perception on screen.

02 “Niu” San​

Around 2010, airport bookstores were stacked high with Machiavellian workplace self-help books. Boosted by the boom in broadcast television and commercial publishing, “interpreting history through human nature” began to be viewed by the public as a more mature, profound stance than traditional grand narratives.

Pulling larger-than-life historical figures off their pedestals and exposing the self-serving calculations behind their polished rhetoric was not considered offensive back then; instead, it served as a badge of intellectual superiority—as if seeing through noble narratives made one fundamentally superior to those who believed in them.

It was precisely with this mindset that the creators of New Three Kingdoms set to work.

Interviews with screenwriter Zhu Sujin and several key creators reveal a clear creative manifesto: they believed that the noble, altruistic figures in the 1994 version and the original novel were not realistic enough—they were hollow symbols emptied out by moral values rather than living human beings. To them, “human nature” meant that every character had to have clear, self-serving motives and desires; they simply did not believe anyone would act purely out of moral righteousness.

Thus, we received an ensemble cast entirely out of character (OOC): a Zhuge Liang who constantly wore a distressed frown and was bullied at the workplace by Guan Yu and Zhang Fei; a manic Cao Cao in a perpetually unhinged mental state who threw tantrums at the drop of a hat; and the Peach Garden trio whose sworn brotherhood felt like plastic friends ready to backstab each other at any moment.

When watching the 1994 version, viewers shed tears over the death of a hero. When watching New Three Kingdoms, the bullet comments shifted to “Finally, a massive menace to the people has been eliminated” and “What a relief.”

Yet dissatisfaction with New Three Kingdoms was not built in a day. Between 2010 and 2020, the primary battleground for discussing the show was Baidu Tieba. It began as nitpicking specific errors: Cao Cao reciting “Death is a cool summer night” (lines actually penned by 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine), geographical absurdities like “Xuzhou is the foremost impregnable pass of the Central Plains” (when Xuzhou is neither in the Central Plains nor an impregnable pass), and redundant, awkward phrasing like “every one of all you gentlemen” peppered throughout the script. These technical critiques gradually coalesced into a systematic challenge to the show's underlying view of history and morality.

As mentioned in the first section, the original novel and the 1994 TV drama had already anchored what the Three Kingdoms “ought to be” in the minds of generations. When an understanding is so deeply rooted, trying to win over audiences by flatly denying it is destined to be a high-cost, low-reward endeavor, because people instinctively protect their existing cognitive frameworks.

Yet New Three Kingdoms chose this exact path: instead of making localized adjustments within the audience's existing cognitive framework, it attempted to tear down the entire framework from the front—effectively erasing the authenticity of mingfen and the ethics of loyalty and righteousness.

In the 1994 version, restoring the Han Dynasty, loyalty, and righteousness carried genuine weight. In New Three Kingdoms, viewers could not feel that these familiar characters genuinely believed in their causes; all grand narratives collapsed into Machiavellian spin designed to manipulate situations. All characters appeared to claim they had mingfen, but no one believed there was any genuine moral backbone behind it.

This is why it felt like a corporate political drama. The essence of office politics is that everyone fights for narrative dominance, but nobody actually believes in the company's mission statement. Thus, the moniker “Niu San” was born: “Niu” plays on the English word “New,” while also punning on the Chinese word for “twisted” or “distorted” (niu), mocking how it warped the audience's established perceptions.

The paradox is that the creators of New Three Kingdoms didn't necessarily think they were distorting anything—they would argue that they referenced not just the novel, but historical records like Records of the Three Kingdoms, attempting to present figures closer to historical reality.

The trouble is that when generations of viewers have had their perception of the Three Kingdoms firmly anchored by the novel and the 1994 adaptation, using an alternative set of sources to dismantle their beloved character archetypes produces the exact same psychological effect as telling them “everything you've always believed is wrong.”

Furthermore, whether based on the novel or historical records, New Three Kingdoms and the 1994 version were ultimately arguing over the exact same question: Were these figures driven by moral principles or by self-interest? One claimed the moral high ground was real; the other claimed it was fake—yet both took it for granted that moral standing was an issue worth arguing about in the first place.

The upcoming generation of viewers, however, had already lost all interest in that question.

03 The Gamer's System Apocalypse​

For a generation raised on video games, whether loyalty and moral standing were real or fake was never an issue they cared about.

In games adapted from the Three Kingdoms (especially the SLG genre), loyalty and titles are routinely quantified into mechanics. While Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms series was heavily influenced visually by the 1994 drama—sharing a direct visual lineage with orthodox adaptations—as a strategy game, it inherently required converting morality, beliefs, and relationships into manipulable numbers:

Popular support is a parameter affecting recruitment efficiency; political legitimacy is a variable influencing diplomatic decisions. When an officer with low loyalty defects, it isn't because of moral bankruptcy; it is simply because a numerical stat crossed a threshold.

San Guo Sha took this even further. Derived from the Italian card game Bang!, it layered Three Kingdoms elements on top, borrowed early character portraits from Koei, and compressed each historical figure into a few lines of skills on a card: Zhuge Liang became “Gazing at the Stars” and “Empty City”; Cao Cao became “Hero of Chaos” and “Escort”; while “Loyalist,” “Rebel,” and “Traitor” were randomly drawn identity cards that dictated victory conditions.

By the time we reach SLG mobile games like Inifinite Borders and Three Kingdoms: Origin of Tactics, which fuse the gacha and microtransaction ethos of anime games, grand alliances equal resource management, and a famous general's worth is measured by gacha pool rarity and stat growth curves.

This was not an intentional attempt by creators to dissolve the moral dimension of the Three Kingdoms; it is an inherent property of video games as a medium: loyalty can only be “felt” by a player once it produces computable consequences within the system. This objectively shaped how a generation initially understood the Three Kingdoms.

Thus, when this game-literate younger generation encountered New Three Kingdoms—a supposedly “serious drama” riddled with plot holes—they did not feel offended or challenged like the Tieba-era audiences did. Instead, they instinctively applied their familiar mental models to ask: What are the rules of this Three Kingdoms system? What are the exploits? What triggers these special events?

Two prominent content creators spearheaded this phase: Bilibili creator Rarondo9, active around 2020, and San Guo Sha streamer Chidanta de Zhebeng, who skyrocketed in popularity in 2024.

The former re-edited dialogue and scenes to rebuild the narrative logic of New Three Kingdoms, having characters bluntly state the self-serving inner thoughts that the show's creators tried to mask with cynical rhetoric. The result was absurd yet deadpan comedy. This marked the starting point of derivative content creators actively treating New Three Kingdoms as a standalone parallel universe detached from official history and the novel.

The latter, Zhebeng, carried this style forward. He deadpanned his way through every single plot hole in New Three Kingdoms, offering no moral judgment, only objective descriptions, striving to formulate a coherent rule for every single narrative bug.

Through this lens, netizens extracted a bizarre yet internally consistent set of rules for New Three Kingdoms:

Three Kingdoms ELO Mechanism: Cao Cao's infinite loop in New Three Kingdoms—“grieving army wins → victorious army grows arrogant → arrogant army loses → defeated army grieves”—prompted viewers to wonder if the show had a roguelike status-cycle built into it.

The New Three Kingdoms Highway: Originally a modest mountain path in the Western Qing Tombs scenic area in Baoding, it was reused to shoot countless marching and journeying scenes across vastly different timeframes and geographic locations, leading viewers to joke that it was a wormhole unique to the New Three Kingdoms universe.

Heaven's Will: Historically referring to the official theological and political prophecy system (apocryphal divination) that tied the “Will of Heaven” to human governance, in New Three Kingdoms it became a periodic “god patch” dropped from above that disrupted the original world line and caused massive historical deviations, creating the unique New Three Kingdoms cosmology.

Soul-Chain Binding Mechanism: Originating from the Peach Garden Oath where Liu, Guan, and Zhang swore to “die on the same day of the same month of the same year,” it was reinterpreted through the lens of the show's plot holes into an underlying game mechanic: “Liu Bei binds Guan Yu and Zhang Fei; if Liu Bei dies, Guan and Zhang must die; if Guan Yu dies, it only affects Zhang Fei; if Zhang Fei dies, it affects no one.”

Under the Soul-Chain mechanic, nobody cares whether Liu Bei is “truly” a benevolent lord or a Machiavellian corporate climber. Everyone simply sees this Liu Bei as a tabletop gamer who drew a terrible hand and wants to commit suicide to log out early and escape the “invisible hand of Heaven's Will.”

These fan reinterpretations also reveal that when grand narratives (whether collective or personal) lose their persuasive power, audiences do not stop thinking. The analytical instinct remains; the pleasure of identifying and naming patterns remains. It's just that this psychological drive is no longer directed toward “what ought to be,” but toward studying the rules themselves. Discovering a mechanic and precisely documenting its trigger conditions provides all the fun and reward one needs.

These repurposed memes have spilled far beyond the drama itself: Song of Guan Yu, which played constantly throughout the show despite rarely having anything to do with Guan Yu's scenes, is now slapped onto mundane daily situations—as soon as the tragic melody kicks in, everything can be let go; “Yeah, what should we eat?” has become a universal non sequitur that fits into any conversation; and Gongsun Zan's critique of the Yuan brothers' deceitfulness—“a pair of smiling tigers, two black-horned sharks”—has become a new plug-and-play meme template for any duo.

These memes have spread so widely among young people that even those completely unfamiliar with the Three Kingdoms storyline can use them fluently in everyday life.

At this stage, however, continuing to dissect bugs in New Three Kingdoms or scrutinizing what a “black-horned shark” actually is seems beside the point.

Copying a grand-sounding or faux-profound yet entirely incoherent line from New Three Kingdoms to roast the situation, mock oneself, and slam the door shut on any serious debate has become a lighter, far more elegant posture. There is no anger, no critique, not even deconstruction anymore—just “So what? What can you do?”

04 Borrowing What Works: Using the Three Kingdoms as an Archetype​

Whether it's the serious 1994 drama, the subversive New Three Kingdoms, or the memetic deconstructions, all of them maintain some relationship with the core of the Three Kingdoms—believing it, denying it, or dissecting it. Yet there is another massive category of Three Kingdoms adaptations that has nothing to do with any of this.

They never intended to engage with the values of the Three Kingdoms in the first place. They don't care whether moral standing is real or fake, nor how the system functions; they only care about what the Three Kingdoms IP inherently provides: a character roster so massive it is practically inexhaustible, a factional network everyone understands in a heartbeat, and a handful of hyper-recognizable tropes attached to every figure. Grab them, stuff them into your own narrative container, and you're good to go.

Interestingly, if we look strictly at the sheer volume of such radical reimagining, far more come from Japan than from China.

The cultural footprint of the Three Kingdoms has long radiated across East Asia. In Japan particularly, Three Kingdoms motifs have penetrated virtually every medium—manga, anime, games, and light novels. Perhaps precisely because creators there sit outside this history, unbound by the burden of “orthodoxy,” they feel zero hesitation in doing whatever they want with it.

What exactly do these works take from the Three Kingdoms? They can be roughly divided into three types:

San Guo Sha compresses every figure into a skill set on a card, representing character extraction at its most extreme. But at least it keeps their factional allegiances intact. Some works don't even care about that.

For example, the dating sim game Koihime†Musou straight up gender-swapped the entire cast into anime girls. Cao Cao became a blonde girl with twin tails, yet players and viewers still instantly knew she was Cao Cao because her goal was to conquer the realm.

SD Gundam Sangokuden crammed every character into mecha, turning Lu Bu into Lu Bu Tallgeese. Outside of the Three Kingdoms, practically no other IP has a roster deep enough to populate an entire Gundam product line without feeling repetitive.

These adaptations work because Three Kingdoms characters are recognizable to an almost symbolic degree: a feather fan and silk cap means Zhuge Liang; the Green Dragon Crescent Blade means Guan Yu. These visual signifiers are so potent that even if you swap humans for Gundams, or men for women, audiences still identify them at a glance.

Koei's other flagship action series, Dynasty Warriors (debuting in 2001), epitomizes this approach. The tripartite division of Wei, Shu, and Wu naturally fits faction selection and stage design; each side boasts its own officer pool and campaign path, allowing players to conquer the land from whichever perspective they choose.

It heavily modernized and stylized the characters—visually, they became flamboyant Japanese action-game avatars bearing little resemblance to the realistic 1994 aesthetic—yet the underlying dynamic of “who aligns with whom and who opposes whom” across Wei, Shu, and Wu remained completely intact. Without that dynamic, the faction-versus-faction gameplay loop would fall apart.

Warriors Orochi went a step further, throwing Three Kingdoms officers and Sengoku-era Japanese warlords onto the same battlefield. The premise required zero onboarding cost solely because both sides came with pre-existing faction webs that players didn't need to learn from scratch.

The anime Ya Boy Kongming! drops Zhuge Liang into a modern Tokyo nightclub, having him apply ancient military strategies to help an underground singer gain followers.

The entire comedic appeal relies on the audience knowing who Zhuge Liang is. If you didn't know that this man with a feather fan and robes was supposed to be a legendary master strategist from the Three Kingdoms, there would be zero comedic contrast in watching him analyze social media algorithms in Shibuya.

The Korean webtoon Modern Three Kingdoms puts Three Kingdoms figures into a contemporary South Korean high school setting under the exact same logic: the baseline assumption that “everyone knows Cao Cao and Liu Bei are rivals” instantly fuels campus comedy drama without needing to explain any backstory from scratch.

The domestic 4-panel comic Moe Sangokushi took things even further, aging the Three Kingdoms down into kindergarten daily life: Liu Bei is the class monitor of the Shu toddler class, Sun Quan manages the Wu class, and the nominal monitor of the Wei class is Liu Xie (Emperor Xian), who has essentially zero presence while Cao Cao calls all the shots. Historical events turn into playground squabbles and toddlers vying for teacher approval; “upholding the emperor to command the lords” becomes preschool politics over the class monitor badge.

What these works borrow is not the value system of the Three Kingdoms, but the encyclopedic knowledge already living rent-free in the audience's heads. Because the target audience already possesses this prerequisite context, creators don't need to waste time setting up the board—they can get straight to the punchline.

That said, some works diverge massively from Romance of the Three Kingdoms without being mere exercises in opportunistic borrowing. Hong Kong comic The Ravages of Time, for example, introduces numerous original characters and offers radically non-traditional interpretations of established figures, yet its core remains a dead-serious philosophical inquiry into how legendary figures in troubled times understood and practiced their personal ideals of moral duty and loyalty.

Ultimately, the Three Kingdoms can withstand being adapted as a superficial template, just as it can withstand being re-entered with entirely divergent philosophical perspectives. Its character pool is vast enough, its factional dynamic complex enough, and its visual icons distinct enough that it can be drafted into any storytelling framework without losing recognizability during the transplant;

At the same time, the foundational texts leave enough deliberate blank spaces to accommodate serious adaptations holding wildly different ideological stances. In the landscape of Chinese intellectual properties, apart from the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West, virtually no other IP achieves both—and both, unsurprisingly, continue to be adapted again and again.

05 Filling the Cracks: The Historical RPF Fandom​

Yet, there is another group engaging with the Three Kingdoms in their own distinct way. They take the characters and their relationships with immense seriousness—to an extent that, in certain respects, surpasses even the 1994 TV drama.

This is the Historical RPF (Real Person Fiction) fandom (shítóng quān).

Shitong is shorthand for “history-oriented fanworks”—fan fiction and art centered on real historical figures, with the Three Kingdoms standing as one of its most active subjects.

Across Lofter, Weibo, and countless QQ groups, historical RPF creators comb through Chen Shou's Records of the Three Kingdoms, Pei Songzhi's annotations, local gazetteers, biographical chronicles, and recent archaeological discoveries. Their goal isn't to publish academic papers, but to take relationships brushed past in a single line of official history—like the mention in Records of the Three Kingdoms: Biography of Zhou Yu that Sun Ce “entered Zhou Yu's inner chambers to pay respects to his mother, sharing all possessions”—and flesh them out with specific expressions, dialogues, emotional subtleties, and scenes. Some make pilgrimages bearing fresh flowers, handwritten letters, and even painkillers to Zhuge Liang's Wuhou Shrine, Zhou Yu's tomb, or Cao Cao's Gaoling mausoleum, as if visiting an old friend.

This brand of creation is distinctly different from “serious” Three Kingdoms adaptations. While the 1994 series believed that the brotherhood of Liu, Guan, and Zhang carried exemplary moral weight for society, the historical RPF fandom cares very little about public-facing, didactic morality. They are far more fascinated by what unfolded in the quiet spaces omitted by history books: What was Zhou Yu actually thinking on the night he held Jiangdong for Sun Ce? What was the undercurrent of tension when Zhuge Liang and Liu Bei met again after the crushing defeat at Yiling?

This is a deeply localized, private re-enchantment—what is being re-enchanted is no longer political title or public loyalty, but intimacy, interpersonal bonds, and those concrete moments compressed by official histories into a solitary word (“fond,” “befriended,” “respected”).

The fandom's concept of “authenticity” is also the polar opposite of New Three Kingdoms. New Three Kingdoms operates on the conviction that behind every noble phrase lies selfish calculation, so ripping away that veil is what constitutes reality. The historical fandom believes the opposite: the unspoken emotional tensions left unrecorded by official annals might well have been the fundamental human engine driving those figures forward over a millennium ago.

The historical RPF community doesn't debate historical accuracy with orthodox adaptations, doesn't contest ideological stances with New Three Kingdoms, doesn't spar over deconstruction levels with meme creators, nor does it squabble over intellectual property use with archetype borrowers. Quietly and completely outside the mainstream gaze, it simply breathes living flesh and blood back into the gaps where official history moved on too fast.

From Chen Shou's restrained documentation to Luo Guanzhong's pro-Shu narrative, from the solemn majesty of the 1994 adaptation to the Machiavellian disillusionment of New Three Kingdoms, from video games quantifying morality into digits to internet memers turning plot holes into worldbuilding lore, from pop-culture archetype borrowing to fan communities restoring historical silences... every telling of the Three Kingdoms is never just about the Three Kingdoms.

Benedetto Croce famously wrote: “All history is contemporary history.” From this perspective, rather than retelling that era of history, each iteration of the Three Kingdoms uses it as a mirror reflecting how the current generation understands meaning.

An era that believed in political duty sought enchantment; an era enamored with office politics sought disillusionment; a generation raised on gaming and web novels investigates rules and mechanics; while others, in quiet corners overlooked by everyone else, tenderly write out the emotions that history left unsaid.

This summer, Light Chaser's Three Kingdoms: Part One is set to arrive in theaters. The tale of the Three Kingdoms will be told once more. Where will it land on the spectrum? Nobody knows. But one thing is almost certain: No matter what this version looks like, it will never be the last.