Steven Spielberg to Direct Ready Player One

Warner Bros. has been very interested in getting a top-tier talent to direct Ready Player One. Just last December, word came out that they offered adapting the Ernest Cline cult classic to Christopher Nolan. Now, they have found their blockbuster auteur who more than promises a unique vision… Steven Spielberg.

As first reported by Deadline, Spielberg has agreed to direct Ready Player One at Warner Bros. with Village Roadhouse also producing.

This will be Spielberg’s first science fiction/fantasy film since 2011’s The Adventures of Tintin. In this story of virtual reality, a game creator offers his entire company to the man that can discover an Easter Egg he has paced in a virtual reality wonderland called “OASIS.” Thus in 2044, teen gamer Wade Watts will attempt to succeed at this virtual sword in the stone quest after many have failed over several decades—by immersing himself into video game and pop culture trivia of the 1980s and ‘90s.

Spielberg appears to be working more closely with Warner Bros. these days after a near-15 year absence from the studio following 2001’s A.I. Spielberg also landed the chance to adapt Lynsey Addario’s war journalist memoir, A Photographer’s Life of Love and War, at the studio with Jennifer Lawrence set to star as Addario. Ready Player One is being fast tracked ahead of the Addario film, though Spielberg’s line-up is already very crowded.

The director’s next feature will be Bridge of Spies, which is a Cold War based drama starring Tom Hanks and written by the Coen Brothers due out in October (it is also easily one of our most anticipated movies of 2015). Afterwards, he is still scheduled to adapt Roald Dahl’s The BFG as his next film. Ready Player One is slotted to be adapted directly after that production.

The most recent script for Ready Player One was written by Zak Penn (X-Men: The Last Stand, The Avengers) with earlier drafts turned in by Eric Eason and the Ready Player One author himself, Ernest Cline.

Assuming all the rights can be acquired from the book’s gamer paradise of references, this should be quite the nostalgia trip. Perhaps Spielberg can even find space to give a nod to the buried landfill of E.T. Atari cartridges, which by 2044 might have great archeological worth all on their own.

We also recently learned exclusively that Ernest Cline is working a sequel to Ready Player One.