The book's awful, they dodged a bullet. It's the kind of cringey thing that they usually would be all up on though.
Smart money might be to keep quiet, let Disney infringe on IP, then after movie is out create a public spectacle, benefit from the global mention, then drop the case before Disney crushes DB. Free IP/Easter egg for Disney, free publicity for DB.
And so far it seems they've turned it into a good movie. I'll be going to see it: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ready_player_one And just because EQ is mentioned in the book, doesn't mean it's mentioned in the movie.
If the main character isn't playing Joust against Acererak for 30 minutes of the movie I'm gonna riot. On a slightly more serious note, I assumed that Ready Player One was the kind of book that just couldn't be made into a movie. For one, it would be a licensing nightmare to incorporate all of the gaming and pop culture references in the book. And two, most of the challenges that Parzival tackles in pursuit of the easter egg are not fun to watch.
It's nowhere near awful, nor is it perfect. For any nerd that grew up in the 80's it's nostalgic gold.
Little old now but I had so much fun with this I thought I'd share it for anyone interested. Two of the guys from Rifftrax (former mystery science theater 3000) did a bookclub podcast on RP1 that I found extremely enjoyable. It's called "372 Pages We'll Never Get Back" available on iTunes, or go to 372pages.com For 8 episodes they poke fun at various aspects of both the plot and the writing ability of Cline, but without going overboard. I read and kinda liked the book, but I loved the podcast bookclub. It went over so well they did another 8-show arc on Cline's second novel Armada, which I still slightly enjoyed, even though I could see some obvious issues as I read it (RP1 has gotten plenty of positive acclaim, but there are few to no positive reviews out there for Armada). Definitely had a blast listening to Mike and Conor, close to 24 hours of content, perfect for those who do a lot of driving. I'll miss stupid sentence of the week!
Movie looks like complete garbage. I can't believe this is coming from Speilberg who has done really interesting sci fi and serious films like Shindler's List. He has so many great movies though he can be given a pass on this dud.
Horses for courses, I guess - the book was great, and as mentioned above, a fantastic nostalgia-fest But then, we had to run barefoot from Qeynos to Freeport and back... uphill BOTH ways it was, too...
movie was ok, I did not see any EQ chars and the their was only one place the story did not make any sense not sure if a scene was cut. Even watched a U-tube show that tried to show all the chars in the movie they saw in the trailer but maybe a new one will show the whole show.
