Kris Straub

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Saw It For You: Ready Player One (2018)

Synopsis. In the future, the creation of new pop culture has been outlawed. One man, Wade Wild Watts, must prove to a dystopian government that all art is appropriated art.

Tagline. Ghostbusters.

Denny's Tie-In Menu Item. The Ready Player One Grand Slam®Grand Slam®, a Grand Slam that contains all other Denny's menu items, including the Grand Slam®Grand Slam® itself, leading to a recursive stack overflow error in the Denny's parser.

Production Trivia.

  • Author Ernest Cline unsuccessfully sued director Steven Spielberg for intellectual property theft in 2016, as Spielberg never obtained permission to adapt Cline's book. Said Spielberg, "Ernie's story remixes beloved pop culture icons into an original work. Now I'm remixing that story with a movie, thus making this into an original work."

  • Due to irreconcilable copyright issues, all Ready Player One characteraction figures are anthropomorphized versions of the movie's logo.

  • To prevent spoilers from leaking, Spielberg demanded a global injunction, halting the sale of all known toys, books, movies and songs until Ready Player One's opening weekend.

  • The hyperlinks that appear during theatrical screenings can be clicked.

  • Production halted for a brutal 15 months, at a cost of $64 million, as likeness rights were negotiated with the ALF estate.

  • Will Smith passed on the role of Anorak, primarily because he was never offered it.

  • An anagram of the title is "A Leery Dope Yarn." This meets the criteria for trivia, but only barely.

  • The screenplay was written in MLA bibliography format.

Mistakes.

  • In the movie's title sequence, the egg in the "O" of the word "One" hatches to reveal Baby Sinclair from the sitcom Dinosaurs, who tells the audience to "enjoy the show." He was supposed to say "Not the mama."

  • In both the book and the movie, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) lives in an Optimus Prime head inside an EVA unit's head inside a giant Neo head (Keanu Reeves). In the movie, Watts calls this his "apartment," while in the book he is infuriated by that term and exclusively refers to it as his "popculturducken."

  • Director's trademark. Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) wordlessly removing her glasses, jaw slack with awe, as she rises from seated to standing up in a Jeep, transfixed by the silent majesty of a towering brachiosaur.

  • Continuity mixup. After the Iron Giant shoots the gun out of Batman's hand, the angle changes to show Smurfette's reaction. However, when we see Batman again, he is still holding Megatron.

  • At one point, Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) mentions a 2016 Ghostbusters with Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy, but this movie does not exist.

  • Director's trademark. The term "goonies," especially when referring to The Goonies (1985).

  • Lara Croft's boobs are big, but not big enough.

  • In the scene where Parzival holds the Mirror of Erised up to deflect the eye beams of a zombie Cyclops, in the reflection we can clearly see the DeLorean that E.T. stole from Snidely Whiplash is the T-1000 Silverhawks Breakfast Club Endor Ark of the Covenant Beetlejuice

  • Incorrectly regarded as error. When Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) speaks the phrase "Just like in Doctor Who," he does not say the show's name with the appropriate level of reverence. However, Sorrento is the villain, and audiences were meant to be enraged at his disrespect.

  • Director's trademark. Actors speaking lines that they memorized from a script, in order to be believable as the movie's characters.

  • If Watts using his feet to roll a pebble to Art3mis as a sign of romantic intent was a reference to the 1995 animated feature The Pebble and the Penguin starring Martin Short and Jim Belushi, the pebble was the wrong color.

  • Credits Kerfuffle. The presence of credits rolling implies that the events that took place are fictional, but they're not. They just can't be.

  • The ASPCA notice "No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture" should read "A statistically insignificant number of animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture, and even fewer died."

  • The "The" in "The End" is in scare quotes.

Memorable Quotes

Wade Watts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One_(film)