Exclusive: Zak Penn provides an update on Ready Player One movie

Over the past few months, we've heard bits and pieces about the progress of a film based on Ernest Cline's sci-fi novel Ready Player One.The Incredible Hulk, and X-Men: The Last Stand screenwriter Zak Penn stepped aboard last June, and by November, it was reported that the script was complete and in the hands of important people at Warner Bros.

Last year, Penn was also making the documentary Atari: Game Over, which, like Cline's novel, is about the golden age of videogames in the 1980s, and how one title in particular - E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial - ended up being buried in a New Mexico rubbish dump.

It was during an interview about that film, out now on Xbox Live and available to stream from other VOD services on the 2nd February, that Penn gave us an update on the Ready Player One screenplay.

Interestingly, Cline was one of the contributors toAtari: Game Over - a bit of synchronicity that helped, Penn says, with the writing of Ready Player One's screenplay:

"I do think, with Ready Player One, it might be because I was spending so much time with Ernie, and the nature of what I was doing with the documentary thrust me into that world, but it hit me over the summer, how to adapt that book. And it's one of the rare times I was just, like, 'Oh my God, this is how you do it. You have to make a couple of choices, but you can turn this into a movie if you do X, Y and Z.'"

One of the source novel's big draws is, of course , its multitude of references to pop culture - not least classic videogames of the 1980s. While these sorts of things could make the film adaptation expensive to license ("That's definitely an issue - how much it's going to cost to make that movie, Penn said),  but at the same time, Penn argues that Ready Player One's references to audio-visual pop culture, from videogames to music to cinema, makes for the perfect premise for a movie.

"...if you're adapting Catcher In The Rye, it's difficult to do anything but make it worse," Penn told us. "It's very hard to capture what makes the book great on film and do justice to it. With Ready Player One, it's this universe he's created with the opportunity to be more true to the thing than the thing itself, if you know what I mean."

Penn further added that  the powers that be at Warner are happy with his screenplay ("The people who are involved, who are big fans of the book [...] seem satisfied with what I've done with it").

At the moment, it's still unclear who will direct Ready Player One (the last we heard, Christopher Nolan was offered to take it on), but in the meantime, there's at least the news that Ernest Cline's working on a sequel to his 2011 novel. With Cline apparently keen to expand the sci-fi universe he set up in his first book, we remain optimistic that Ready Player One will appear on the silver screen very soon.

More onReady Player One as it comes in.