Ready Play­er One trail­er reunites Steven Spiel­berg with his DeLorean

San Diego Com­ic-Con unveiled a tonne of new trail­ers over the week­end, but the one that caught our eye was this gem for Steven Spielberg’s Ready Play­er One. Adapt­ed from Fan­boys screen­writer Ernie Cline’s debut nov­el of the same name, this dystopi­an sci-fi is absolute­ly jam-packed with ​’80s pop cul­ture ref­er­ences, mak­ing it one of our most antic­i­pat­ed films of next year.

The sto­ry is set in 2044 (2045 in the film) and imag­ines a world in decay. Fos­sil fuels have run dry, glob­al warm­ing is in full effect, there are wide­spread social prob­lems stem­ming from a col­laps­ing glob­al econ­o­my. Life is no longer sat­is­fy­ing and thus a world of vir­tu­al real­i­ty has tak­en its place for a gen­er­a­tion known as the ​“miss­ing millions”.

A vir­tu­al expe­ri­ence called the Oasis is the only escape, and in the wake of its creator’s (Mark Rylance) pass­ing, he leaves behind East­er Eggs with­in the game to name the company’s suc­ces­sor. Avid ​’80s enthu­si­ast Wade Watts (Tye Sheri­dan), and his team final­ly locate the first of the three clues, launch­ing them into a meta adven­ture filled with ref­er­ences to every­one from Fred­dy Krueger to the Iron Giant.

This vivid trail­er is burst­ing with instant­ly recog­nis­able char­ac­ters and props from film his­to­ry, includ­ing the DeLore­an from the Back to the Future fran­chise, which was pro­duced by Spielberg’s Amblin Enter­tain­ment. Speak­ing to Col­lid­er in 2016, Spiel­berg explained, ​“one of the rea­sons I decid­ed to make the movie was that it brought me back to the ​’80s.”

Of course, the ref­er­ences in Ready Play­er One extend beyond Spielberg’s fil­mog­ra­phy, and at Com­ic-Con Cline revealed, ​“one of the most fun things was lis­ten­ing to [screen­writer] Zak Penn and Steven come up with fun things to insert into the film, and because it’s Steven a lot of peo­ple said yes.” It’s safe to say that with­out Spielberg’s involve­ment, get­ting the film made would have proven extreme­ly tricky.

With Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendel­sohn, Simon Pegg, TJ Miller and Han­nah John-Kamen co-star­ring along­side Rylance and Sheri­dan, we can’t wait to be tak­en on what is sure to be a fun-filled nos­tal­gia trip.

Ready Play­er One is released on 30 March, 2018.

LWLies 107: The Sin­ners issue – Out now!