With the arrival of the trailer at San Diego ComicCon this year we had our first look at Stephen Spielberg’s adaptation of Ernest Cline’s 2011 debut sci-fi novel, Ready Player One. It’s shaping up to be one of the big releases of 2018 and while there are number of other biggies with Avengers: Infinity War Part 1, The Han Solo Movie and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, this could be the surprise science fiction hit of the year.
Stephen Spielberg has had a lot of success over the years directing big sci-fi films like Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, E.T. and Minority Report, but you’ll have to go back to 2005’s War Of The Worlds for his last major production. The trailer looks like he’s about to return in a big way though and with an exciting cast lead by Tye Sheridan (X-Men: Apocalypse) it could be another future classic for Spielberg.
Release date
Cinema:
Ready Player One has been slated for a UK release date of Friday the 30th March 2018, which is the same date that its planned for the US, so things could move around a little before then. There isn’t much else planned for release on the same weekend in the UK, so it’s currently got a pretty clear window at the box office and with Easter around the same time in 2018, it could do very well.
DVD, Blu-ray and digital download:
Based on previous Warner Bros. Pictures release schedules, we’re expecting it to arrive on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download in late July or early August 2018 in the UK.
Story
The plot is set in 2045, but centres on a 1980s obsessed kid from Columbus, Ohio called Wade Owen Watts (Tye Sheridan) who enters a tournament playing the all-encompassing virtual reality simulator, OASIS. The prize is the vast fortune of recently deceased billionaire, James Halliday, the creator of OASIS, but he’ll need to find the Easter Egg hidden inside the virtual environment to win it.
However, everyone else has got the same idea, so the competition is thick and fast as the world is a pretty desperate place in the future with Wade living in the top trailer in a huge scaffolding stack that makes up his neighbourhood. He’ll be drawing on all of his 20th Century movie love as he goes, so he’ll have a virtual reality DeLorean DMC-12 from Back To The Future to race around in and The Iron Giant to call on for help.
Cast
Mark Rylance (Dunkirk) joins Tye Sheridan in the cast as the recently deceased eccentric genius behind OASIS, James Halliday. The Ready Player One cast also includes Olivia Cooke (Me And Earl And The Dying Girl), Ben Mendelssohn (Rogue One), Simon Pegg (Star Wars: The Last Jedi) and T.J. Miller (How To Train Your Dragon 3).
Production
Stephen Spielberg directs the film from a screenplay written by Ernest Cline and Zak Penn. Spielberg is also down as one of the producers, along with Donald De Line, Kristie Macosko Krieger and Dan Farah. Adam Somner, Daniel Lupi, Chris DeFaria and Bruce Berman are down as executive producers with Warner Bros. releasing the film.
First impressions
The Ready Player One trailer looks very cool and with Spielberg directing, it should be a potential future classic in the making. Tye Sheridan looks like a good selection for the lead role and he’s got a descent supporting cast to work with so things couldn’t look much more positive for the 2018 release at the moment.
Family sci-fi adventures don’t always work out as well as their trailers imply, though, with films like Tomorrowland going on to disappoint. Hopefully, that isn’t the case for Ready Player One.
