Are We Ever Going to See a Ready Player One Sequel?

One has to wonder if we really need a sequel to Ready Player One, but then again it might be kind of a shame to let a universe like this go without another big bad for the group to go up against. Plus, after so long what might have happened to all of them? Considering that gaming has pretty much become the way to interact in this world it’s fair to state that there might be threats coming from any given angle since there’s a good chance that there might always be a business competitor willing to outdo those at the top in order to cash in on a new idea that people will pay big for. Christian Long of The Hollywood Reporter wrote a bit about the author of the book, Ernest Cline, and how he wanted to keep writing, but wasn’t certain that he’d be done with the books before the movie was on the way. In a sense this is kind of what happened to George R.R. Martin, the creator of Game of Thrones, in that he lost track of time and was overrun by the show before he could finish the book, which feels like a giant cop-out but might have some credence to it if the author somehow can’t find the time to write or can’t think around corners when it comes to attaching the next novel to the material that’s already there. As a writer this is frustrating to hear and as a reader it’s even more frustrating to realize that there are in fact authors that run into this limitation far too often.

At this point Cline is definitely working on a book which means that he’ll likely be working on the screenplay, but as far as who’s coming back we can expect to see the High Fivers returning since they were put in control of the Oasis after all and have become the bosses. But whether that will change them moving forward or not will remain to be seen. Then there’s the idea of whether or not we’ll see or hear about Halliday any further, since he never did answer Parzival when asked what he was, considering that he wasn’t really Halliday, but an AI that was left behind as a ‘ghost in the machine’ as Ian Sandwell of DigitalSpy mentioned. There are still plenty of questions about the movie that we have yet to discover, as the first movie was a small section of a world that’s been engrossed in a video game that has virtually no limits as has been seen. Just what pop culture icons will be delivered to the audience this time around will be hard to predict though since Cline has already made it clear that he doesn’t want to use the same old things over and over. Plus, the challenge that might be presented to the High Five will no doubt have to be formidable since the five of them are highly-skilled and highly-intuitive individuals that lack only one thing: life experience. Face it, they all entered this game as kids and despite their very real skill sets they excelled in the Oasis, but not so much in the real world. They were great at finding clues, acting like amateur detectives and following the hints as they were given. But it’d be interesting to see how far outside the Oasis Cline is willing to take things in the second movie, and how far into the virtual world he’s willing to go in order to really flesh it out.

Likely as not a sequel won’t be coming out all that soon thanks to the shutdown, but even if it did come out next year it feels as though the whole thing might be a little too rushed, as Cline has shown that he wants to flesh the story out as much as possible in order to make sure that he’s paying homage to certain parts of pulp culture while not saturating the story with too much one thing or another. It might pay to keep such things as the respective vehicles of the High Five and their looks, but there would need to be a big change since there were quite a few pop culture references in the first movie and while there are still more that could be used, if Spielberg refuses to use any that come from movies that he directed it’s going to limit the scope just a little. With that being said however there’s still plenty of pop culture to go around provided that Cline knows how to look and how to blend it all together in a way that will make sense and give a bit more oomph to a sequel, as it’s going to need it to really shine. The first movie did raise the bar a bit after all. Elliott Figueira of CBR has something to add to this.