I imagine myself celebrating every bit of news to come out ahead of Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ernest Cline’s pop-culture-dystopian novel Ready Player One. Not only is Ready Player One one of my favorite novels of all time, but Spielberg himself is my favorite filmmaker and has long been a personal hero of mine. I was thrilled by news earlier this year that Spielberg was directing an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG, a book I read over and over growing up and just recently read to my own children for the first time. That’s why it was so fitting to hear just a few months later that his directing followup to The BFG would be Ready Player One, a book I’ve obsessively read multiple times over the last two years.
So, there’s no news on casting yet, but it was just announced that the film will be released on December 15, 2017. Sure, that’s a long time, but the buildup to that date is going to be thrilling. It will be especially intriguing to learn how this Warner Bros., Village Roadshow and DreamWorks production will manage to nail down the rights to all of the media properties, franchises and characters referenced and included in Cline’s novel. These pop-culture references are the heart of the novel and more than essential to the films success, but if anyone can get it done, it’s Spielberg!
In the meantime, be sure to catch up with Cline’s recently released follow-up to Ready Player One; Armada, and check out Spielberg’s next film Bridge of Spies when it hits theaters on October 16th.
I dunno…I thought the sum total of the book was merely an “OK”. It is indeed entertaining as hell, but it makes some maddeningly predictable choices in characterization and the theme doesn’t appear to be decided upon until the denouement (a theme that contradicts everything about the story to that point). Spielberg is only right for this in the sense that he’d be one of the few filmmakers who might be able to actually secure the budget to realize some of the events. I’m not sure how he’d do portraying the 80s pop-culture nostalgia, seeing as he was so instrumental creating it from the inside. Somebody like Edgar Wright might actually be a better choice.