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So from the moment i read Ready Player One, i was stoked, start to finish, it had its ups and downs sure, what book doesn't. But last year it was announced, a movie adaptation was announced.

I looked at this with both a mix of terror and glee. If you have read Ready Player One, you probably know why. It is literally chock full of pop culture reference's from firefly to short circuit. around to star wars and then back to the future, from tabletop rpg's to super video games, if you want it its there.

So you might see if you had not read the book where the problem might arise in making a movie adaptation, the rights it would either have to subvert or get access to is just mind boggling.

Now i hear, that spielberg might be doing the movie and he is going to cut things, mostly things pertaining to works he has done, and works he has been involved in.

Now clearly, this movie cannot come to fruition in its entirety, just because of the sheer licensing needs, not to mention all the studios that own those rights. But how much can they truly cut, while still being able to say its Ready Player One? Those references make the book what it is, almost as much as the actual story.

For those of you who havent read the book, do so, it was a really good read, and if you like it check out his other book, Armada.

So what do you think? Will they utterly destroy a movie that could be a pop sensation? Will they keep mostly true to form?

Cline's already sold the rights for Armada to Universal. I liked the novel, enough variations from The Last Starfighter for it to not be deriviative(if anything, there are more parallels to Greg Bear's The Forge Of God duology than to Starfighter), but whoever does the screenplay(and, I can't honestly see why they wouldn't tap Cline for this, given his work on Fanboys) needs to do one damn good job at it to keep people from thinking it is a derivative of The Last Starfighter, while keeping the attention of people who have read the novel, and those who've heard of neither one.

I haven't read Ready Player One, but I'm not sure how people will deal with another movie set in another virtual world, especially after the trio of really shitty movies set in the Matrix.

I did not know he had Armada on the books too, thats good, i hope they do a good job with it.

I actually, mostly, enjoyed the matrix movies. But ready Player One is basically nerd heaven, a virtual world you can go into whenever you want featuring essentially everything you could ever want. If you like Armada the Novel i totally suggest reading Ready Player One. Once you have you will see the sheer amount of problems in making a film adaptation of it.

You could actually do it by skirting the copyrighted imagery very closely, but never quite crossing the lines. "Star Wars" becomes "Star Wreaks", for example. The hazard of such an approach is that it evokes parody rather than serious film, though, which is because that's pretty much parody rights right there.

I think they're just going to have to pick and choose which licenses they could get away with not including in the movie. There was a stunning amount of geek references in there, it makes sense that most people who haven't read the book wouldn't notice that so and so was missing.

The way that book is packed with references, and being scripted by the original author, they'll probably just line up licensing rights in step with the script. Few of them are any more important then others except Adventure which shouldn't be a serious problem to obtain. Spielberg said all his material will be removed, which lol, most blatant telegraph possible for an easter egg possible.

Fun book, but for a book written to be a movie from the first place, I think it will just be terrible actually being made into one. It would need a very fine line of the amount of nerd oppressed out of its script.

No matter what this should be able to have a couple awesome on screen fights though, failure to accomplish this would be really bad movie making. If our movies are going to be loaded down with silly unrealistic CGI we might as well remove the pretext of being real and go crazy.

U.P. Cinnabar wrote: I haven't read Ready Player One, but I'm not sure how people will deal with another movie set in another virtual world, especially after the trio of really shitty movies set in the Matrix.

I don't think the VR part will be the problem, but we'll see. The 'real life' part of the book isn't as terrible as the Matrix which was dominated by real life and digital pseudoscience. The in game fights should be amusing, as the VR world game supports everything you could want. You just gotta accept the basic post peak oil economic doomacayplse setting which is deliberately in tune with the books 1980s everything style.

Last_Shadow wrote:But ready Player One is basically nerd heaven, a virtual world you can go into whenever you want featuring essentially everything you could ever want. If you like Armada the Novel i totally suggest reading Ready Player One. Once you have you will see the sheer amount of problems in making a film adaptation of it.

It probably is different, just as season one of SeaQuestDSV was different from the 31 Flavors of Star Trek. But, that didn't stop people from criticizing it as "Star Trek underwater," and not giving the series half a chance, did it? People are just...dumb that way.

Sea Skimmer wrote:I don't think the VR part will be the problem, but we'll see. The 'real life' part of the book isn't as terrible as the Matrix which was dominated by real life and digital pseudoscience. The in game fights should be amusing, as the VR world game supports everything you could want. You just gotta accept the basic post peak oil economic doomacayplse setting which is deliberately in tune with the books 1980s everything style.

Next trip to Hastings, that gets added to the reading list. Armada and Fanboys both piqued my interest in Cline, and the Wikipedia article on it made me want to take a look at it. As for the post-peak oil economic doompocalypse scenario, it's been done enough times that it probably won't even be noticeable. Hell, I've played Twilight 2000 enough times to see all 31 Flavors of WWIII anyway.

Its pretty damn generic anyway, shit doesn't work because everyone is stupid is about the sum of it. The only defining characteristic at all are the 'stacks' of RVs and old vehicles dirt poor people are supposed to live in, which is just plain ludicrous for any purpose but I strongly suspect was pure movie bait for the visuals. None of this terribly matters, the main character reflects early on that his life certainly isn't the worst in the shitty world.

The "stacks" setup was rather novel. One of the biggest draws for me to the book, was all the pop culture stuff. I mean if you fudge alot of it, you get the basic story going along, which is great. But i think it was cool that there was a little of everything for people to relate to, once you start taking those things away it gets smaller.

Sure you can replace his DeLorean with K.I.T.T. onboard and ghostbuster stickers, but in the book he was proud of that item. Same thing with the giant robots in some of the book. You can replace the Johnny 5's with knock off's, not really a big deal. But if say Fox comes down, and says you cant use the firefly ship, you lose more.

The books pop culture references are what sets it apart from other books, taking them out will just move it towards generic scifi and it might as well be sword art online with live action.

LastShadow wrote: But if say Fox comes down, and says you cant use the firefly ship, you lose more.

That would require a person to be a fan of Firefly in the first place, which statistically people aren't. Which is why it was cancelled and the movie utterly flopped....

I think the biggest issue on the table would be the ability to incorporate any Star Wars content or not. That's big both in direct references and how damn popular we KNOW it would be if such a game existed. And I also still think the real issue with be how the main characters are presented. That will murder the movie far more rapidly then the choice of Kitt over an X-wing and its not a challenge I expect to be met. Spielberg's work has not been impressing me for a long time.

Sea Skimmer wrote:Fun book, but for a book written to be a movie from the first place, I think it will just be terrible actually being made into one. It would need a very fine line of the amount of nerd oppressed out of its script.

Despite the fact that the author was a scriptwriter before writing this book, which obviously made it feel like a movie in terms of the overall story, he actually stated that he wrote it as a break from writing a movie script in which he was allowed to write whatever he wanted.

What I found truly interesting about the story is that while it was actually an outright dystonia, most who read it don't feel that way. It accurately portrays what would happen if society developed a holodeck. It really could very easily lead to creative sterility and society preferring that fantasy to reality to the point that people stop actually caring about reality all that much. Does anyone remember that the opening of the book directly mentioned that nuclear weapons had been used on cities in the last couple of decades?

One other odd problem that is rather ironic when contrasted with real life video games, is that The OASIS was a free to play game, something often criticized in reality. Their profits came from selling items in game.

Sea Skimmer wrote:That would require a person to be a fan of Firefly in the first place, which statistically people aren't. Which is why it was cancelled and the movie utterly flopped....

This is slightly off topic, but I vastly preferred the film Serenity to the series. Even if the ending was problematic from a logic perspective. The failure of the film in particular shows that fanboys don't make a work popular. It requires a wide audience to be drawn in for it to survive.

Though you are of course correct that Star Wars would be a bigger loss. As another aside, one thing I felt odd was that Star Wars was massively under powered when Wade was able to use his Firefly class as a more powerful vessel. It was also odd that FTL was not possible, even with X-wings or the Enterprise.

Adam Reynolds wrote: Despite the fact that the author was a scriptwriter before writing this book, which obviously made it feel like a movie in terms of the overall story, he actually stated that he wrote it as a break from writing a movie script in which he was allowed to write whatever he wanted.

Well I read he had an option sold on it as a script before he wrote anything, so maybe maybe not.

One other odd problem that is rather ironic when contrasted with real life video games, is that The OASIS was a free to play game, something often criticized in reality. Their profits came from selling items in game.

Well yeah but the problem is that only works when you already have a huge playerbase, or extremely low costs. Which means its reallly hard to get a game like that going, even the server costs alone actually do matter. That will improve over time, but in reality I think this is a major contradiction in the universe, it had several. If energy is so damn scarce then building and running the magically lag free game servers and doing everything else is unlikely to be cheap. Also the labor surplus of the post oil doom wouldn't favor slavery! But whatever, I liked the idea too. The game is pretty much magic anyway, as is mentioned a few times the lack of lag is basically implausible sometimes.

Though you are of course correct that Star Wars would be a bigger loss. As another aside, one thing I felt odd was that Star Wars was massively under powered when Wade was able to use his Firefly class as a more powerful vessel. It was also odd that FTL was not possible, even with X-wings or the Enterprise.

The vs debate mentality would never work if you wanted a world spanning culture shifting game. Its abundantly clear that the game simply works based on levels. You can level up to 99, and a certain amount of rare overleveled objects exist but while mods are allowed the supply of those seems very finite. Beyond that different things are equal on the basis of typical comic book crossover rules.

FTL was possible, it sounded like using the same kind of drive on all ships, and you were immune while using it. It was just speed capped, and the game made money by selling fast travel teleportation of ships and people. And you had to buy your ship fuel to use the FTL anyway.

Yeah, in the game universe, things worked as much on a basis of Rule of Cool as anything else. A Firefly gets more cachet than a X-wing because while in terms of actual power the X-wing might be more impressive, the Firefly was basically one of the stars of its own show. The X-wing? Just one of a whole bunch of space-fighters. Likewise, if a Galaxy-class starship showed up in the game, it would probably be stronger than a X-wing for the same reason.

Elheru Aran wrote:Yeah, in the game universe, things worked as much on a basis of Rule of Cool as anything else. A Firefly gets more cachet than a X-wing because while in terms of actual power the X-wing might be more impressive, the Firefly was basically one of the stars of its own show. The X-wing? Just one of a whole bunch of space-fighters. Likewise, if a Galaxy-class starship showed up in the game, it would probably be stronger than a X-wing for the same reason.

Except he was in his X-wing when he took the Firefly transport. And i would really hope a Galaxy class can stand up to an X-wing, In any universe. A squadron or 2 might give a galaxy a run, but just one, no chance.

Sea Skimmer wrote:

LastShadow wrote: But if say Fox comes down, and says you cant use the firefly ship, you lose more.

That would require a person to be a fan of Firefly in the first place, which statistically people aren't. Which is why it was cancelled and the movie utterly flopped....

I think the biggest issue on the table would be the ability to incorporate any Star Wars content or not. That's big both in direct references and how damn popular we KNOW it would be if such a game existed. And I also still think the real issue with be how the main characters are presented. That will murder the movie far more rapidly then the choice of Kitt over an X-wing and its not a challenge I expect to be met. Spielberg's work has not been impressing me for a long time.

Part of why the show was cancelled was it was aired out of order, which led to a jumbled story and general dislike of the show. And if there where not enough statistical people that liked Firefly, Serenity never would have been made. Just saying.

If the OASIS came out tomorrow, it would be an awesome place for people of every type of fandom to come together. And i think that is kind of the point, yes firefly may have not been an all time breaker for records, but it has a serious cult following, while it may not be the largest, that makes it no less important.

Replacing any ICONIC types of things will cheapen the adaptation to a point that it would not even be worth making under the title Ready Player One, it would just be another poorly done adaptation. And say Disney goes for it and says YES you can use star wars stuff, and some of the other big ones say yes, would it not look petty to say no? Not like this exists as stuff in a fictional game, that takes place in a fictional world right?

What if they dont allow Voltron in? Or Mecha Godzilla? Or the Marveller? It would lessen the impact of the icons, unless they put in 100x more effort and invent a whole new pop culture loosely based on the current pop culture so it feels right, but bears no resemblance to anything in current 80's pop culture.

Maybe replace Voltron with Wolves instead of Lions and call it something else?

My point is how many Iconic things can you remove or fudge over before it becomes nothing like you envisioned in the book?

Probably a lot of them, certainly not all of them, but I'll face facts now that random rights are bound to be withheld from a smaller studio like Warner Brothers. Speilberg no doubt has some personal pull on these things, and very short features can be covered under fair use, but life is life. I liked it for the core plot and the ideas it conveyed, not because of any specific name drop. As it was the A-Team barely got mentioned! At least its actually from the 1980s.