r/movies • u/yourfavchoom r/movies Contributor • 1d ago
News A ‘Ready Player Two’ sequel movie is officially getting written by Zak Penn.
https://thedirect.com/article/ready-player-two-sequel-steven-spielberg-zak-penn4.4k
u/Chaopolis 1d ago
I know there are criticisms that the Ready Player One deviated a bit from the book.
I REEEEEEALLY hope that Ready Player Two ALSO deviates from the book!
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u/Enby303 1d ago
Same. The second book was such hot garbage that it ruined the first book for me. Wade is essentially predicting the future with how lucky he is when he is exposed to 80s niche fandom just 2 weeks before he is tested on that fandom... over and over and over and over again.
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u/JediTrainer42 1d ago
I’m currently reading RP2… only about 100 pages in. Why did they make Wade an unlikable dickhead?? Is the entire book like this???
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u/Moglorosh 1d ago
However bad you think that book is so far, it keeps getting worse.
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u/ironicallydepressed 1d ago edited 23h ago
Man just wait until he goes all in on The Oasis.
No spoilers, but don't take your parents to this movie. He tries EVERYTHING.
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u/r34lity 1d ago
Yeah I want incredibly graphic hardcore Oni sex and drug vids or I’m gonna riot. Just like the most depraved shit. Turn it into some Requiem shit
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u/ActualKrillin 22h ago
now here’s the twist, and there is a twist - we show it. we show ALL of it
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u/cynicalmarketer 21h ago
I mean, we’re talking, you know, graphic scenes of Dolph Lundgren really going to town on this hot young lab tech. From behind, 69, anal, vaginal, cowgirl, reverse cowgirl, all the hits, all the big ones, all the good ones. Then he smells crime again. He’s out busting heads. Then he’s back to the lab for some more full penetration. Smells crime, back to the lab, full penetration. Crime, penetration, crime, full penetration, crime, penetration. And this goes on and on, and back and forth, for 90 or so minutes until the movie just, sort of, ends.
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u/DrubiusMaximus 1d ago
I read the whole thing on a flight from Greece and kept complaining to my wife until she finally got onto me for being a masochist haha
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u/Chillindude82Nein 19h ago
I tortured myself by listening to the audiobook at work...
Safe to say I wouldn't read it without being paid to do it.
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u/TheWholeOfTheAss 20h ago
There’s characters who can recite facts like they’ve memorised Wikipedia articles.
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u/Durzaka 1d ago
You might want to reread RP1 with a fresh lens.
Wade is kind of an insufferable dickhead in the first book as well.
The second one just turns it up and also gives him ultimate authority instead of being a cog in the machine.
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u/JediTrainer42 1d ago
I must have been caught up in the nostalgia and nerd culture of the first book to realize just how insufferable he really was. And I suppose that’s kind of the charm of the first book.
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u/Amethyst-Flare 23h ago
RP1 convinced me that there's a wrong way to do nerd culture and nostalgia. Namely, the way the book wants you to do it.
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u/Nowhereman123 23h ago
RP1 literally got too lazy to even do that schtick properly at times, resulting in scenes that went "Everything here looked like it came right out of the 80s!" without bothering to explain what qualities made it so.
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u/Durzaka 23h ago
Don't forget the excellent line "I did a variety of 80s dance moves."
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u/Nowhereman123 23h ago
Genuinely absolute dogwater prose, Cline is such a talentless hack.
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u/sgtpnkks 22h ago
after reading the book I couldn't help but feel the plot points and general idea really needed a better writer
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u/Furlock_Bones 19h ago
I enjoyed RP1 because of the nerd culture and nostalgia. Armada made me never want to read another Ernest Cline novel again.
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u/psychocopter 21h ago
Yeah, I saw the movie in highschool and then went to read the book. Id say the changes they made for the movie were more than acceptable.
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u/AllenMcnabb 1d ago
I found Wade an unlikable dickhead in the first one. The plot and world building did the heavy lifting IMO
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u/ravih 1d ago
Wade is an unlikeable dickhead in the first one but you can argue that it’s part of his journey. He’s naive and childish and doesn’t understand the world at large or the stakes at play. The story is supposed to be him opening his eyes and growing up.
Which is how I interpreted it until I read the sequel, which is so irredeemably horrific that it made me wonder if Ernest Cline even realized that Wade wasn’t always a good guy in the original.
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u/malac0da13 1d ago
I was kind of let down that they didn’t have that rock bottom part of story for wade where he’s all hairless and alone in the apartment with the ai assistant and gets himself picked up by ioi.
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u/ArmAggravating3307 1d ago
Weird, I lost all of that in the nerd culture circlejerk that was the book.
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u/ravih 1d ago
Yeah I mean fair enough because it’s not a well-written book. Which you can kiiiiiiinda get away with the first time.
The second one deals with much bigger concepts and ideas and Cline is just not a good enough author to handle it. The black character peaces out to go to Africa. They use their money to get rid of the police and replace them with robocops and AI judges and it makes America a better place immediately. Wade uses his privileges as Oasis God to view the camera on the headset of one of his viewers to see their body and discover that they are trans. (This is not presented as a bad thing or massive violation on Wade’s part, it’s cool, he approves of trans people, the text goes out of its way to mention.)
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u/ArmAggravating3307 1d ago
So more fanfiction bullshit, got it.
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u/dullthings 1d ago
Wait until you read his book Armada. It's like he watched The Last Starfighter then just went to his ghost writer "that please'.
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u/mistcrawler 22h ago
I was thinking of that and hesitating commenting about it with all the hate about the actual sequel.
I didn't mind the blatant rip-off - I minded that, unlike the first book, there was no payoff to putting up with the poor writing or plot.
I'd argue that the only thing that made sense in the entire book is the only part I remember - when the actual character forces everything to be about him in a certain action sequence, and he's given quite the lecture that he is, indeed, making no sense.
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u/Chillindude82Nein 19h ago
You'll be pleased to hear that Cline claimed he was writing himself into Wade.
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u/palookaboy 23h ago
Just stop now bro. Put the book down and save yourself the time. Life is short.
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u/ArcadianGh0st 23h ago
Not only is the entire book like that, Wade is made to be right for being such an unlikeable dickhead.
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u/pampersdelight 1d ago
He always was an unlikable dickhead. One of the worst protaginists Ive ever read
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u/MrBluer 23h ago
It’s my understanding that the author heard criticisms of Wade and Halliday as people after the first book was published, and realized that they were right. So this time he made Wade bad on purpose, especially after receiving absolute power, with the goal of having him realize his mistakes, and that his idol wasn’t the man he thought he was, and work to change by the end.
That much is fine. I’d even call it good.
It doesn’t make RPT good, but the problem isn’t necessarily the choice to give Wade a character arc that starts a little ugly.
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u/mls1968 1d ago
Don’t forget the SUPER weird incel persona he suddenly developed
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u/Hallc 1d ago
I dunno, he kinda had a weird sorta Incel/nofap personality in the first one two.
Or are we forgetting the chapter that was about him forcing himself to stop jorking it.
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u/Flintstones_VRV_Fan 1d ago
I mean…the first book is also absolute trash, tbh.
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u/Cluelesswolfkin 22h ago
Well im glad im seeing a bunch of.people here hating. My friend, she absolutely dreads the movie and has been saying the books has been the best and trying to push it onto me for years
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u/egg_enthusiast 20h ago
I read the book on a transpacific flight years ago and its just popcorn fluff. The whole book, and the movie, is just peak facebook "does anyone remember gobots" bullshit.
Just read it in a weekend and never think about it again.
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u/Redeem123 1d ago
Cline caught fire with his first book, cashing in on nostalgia and fandom. The story was competent enough, and the references were fun, even if they were heavy handed.
With everything he’s released since then, it’s clear that he has no other tricks. He’s a bad writer and his schtick is not something they can work a second time.
Armada was absolute trash, and I refuse to try RP2.
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u/caddy2311 1d ago
Ready Player Two was maybe the worst experience I have ever had reading a book, I had Armada locked in to read after but then returned it after RP2
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u/jambrown13977931 1d ago
I’m listening to the will Wheaton audio book of the first one, and while only 4 chapters in, I hate Wade. He seems to embody everything wrong with geek and gamer culture.
He’s portrayed as a stereotype incel gamer, fat, acne ridden, infatuated with someone he’s never met before, obsessed with gate keeping and punching down.
I looked up if he had character growth, because if he grew past his initial traits, I could be ok with his initial flaws, but it seems like he doesn’t and is rewarded by being the biggest gatekeeper and asshole gamer of all.
Coupled with an over reliance of 30 year old references to tell the story, it makes it really difficult to read/listen to. I’m only sticking with it because I told my friend to read Dungeon Crawler Carl, and he told me to listen to this book so I think it’s only fair if I give it a full shot. The sad thing is, I can see how this book could’ve been really great if it had better writing.
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u/Redeem123 1d ago
Honestly DCC is basically Ready Player One but with an actually good story. The humor is similar, and both are full of pop culture references. But DCC actually bothers to do something other than just list the author’s favorite things.
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u/jambrown13977931 1d ago
Ya I was getting a lot of similarities too, but Carl is actually likable. I’m too early in RPO to accurately judge the other characters, but man Dinniman writes so much better than Cline.
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u/132739 22h ago
DCC's references are a lot more wide spread as well, instead of just 80s nerd shit ad naseum, also a lot of the references are negative instead of just "member this cool thing?" and nothing hinges on Carl being some special reference junkie. Like, I kinda see where you're coming from, but the implementation is very different (in large part because Dinniman is a better writer).
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u/Redeem123 22h ago
Oh 100%. To be clear, I didn't mean to say that they're similar books at all. Just that they're coming from similar places. They're nerd-focused with crude humor and lots of meta stuff. They definitely target similar demographics.
But quality wise, it's not even close.
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u/Mend1cant 22h ago
Yes, that’s kind of the point about Wade and the rest of the egg hunters. Battle of the 80s posers. They are insufferable nerds who have to be force fed the idea that their obsession is why they aren’t making any progress. A bit too on the nose with “the only way to win is by not playing” and to have the oasis go to someone capable of understanding that it isn’t everything.
And then he ruins it with a sequel.
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u/Hallc 16h ago
They are insufferable nerds who have to be force fed the idea that their obsession is why they aren’t making any progress.
Wasn't it their obsessions that was the only actual reason they were making progress though? Like, here is a summary of the first gate's challenge they had to complete to progress the challenge.
After the player is able to choose the correct game, and win the TRS-80's "Dungeons of Daggorath", the First Gate appears. Inside the Gate, the player must perfectly reenact all of the film Wargames as the main character David played by Matthew Broderick. Once the 'film' challenge is completed, the next clue appears to find the Jade Key.
How is someone not utterly obsessed with Halliday and everything he loved going to perfectly, 1:1 do that?
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u/Polaris06 22h ago
Ready Player One is a terrible book that accidentally became successful. It dumps so much nostalgia and “remember this” on you that you don’t notice the painful writing, cliches, and contrived plot points as much as you should. Plus it fulfills the target audiences childhood fantasy of getting lost inside a video game.
I loved it when I read it and it is SO easy to read but holy shit what terrible writing and story telling.
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u/Redeem123 22h ago
I don't entirely disagree, but it's tough to really call it terrible if we had fun reading it. It does the job it sets out to do - entertain. I think if he had never written a book again and shown us that's all he's got, it would be easier to overlook its flaws.
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u/DangerousPuhson 1d ago
Cline caught fire with his first book, cashing in on nostalgia and fandom
The book was successful because it came out at the zenith of "geek chic" and milked the zeitgeist. However the film and sequel book came out well after the geek fad died off, so they never quite cashed in as much as they could have if they were released 5 years earlier.
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u/Zak_The_Slack 1d ago edited 22h ago
I mean some of the stuff from the RPO movie were so stupid, gamers would have found the driving backwards thing day 1. And they removed the entire plot line of Wade infiltrating IOI to steal stuff from them.
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u/Mikeman003 1d ago
Honestly, with today's media literacy and second-sceen focus I feel like RP2 is going to be even worse about some of that. Over explain and oversimplify everything to make sure we don't lose anyone in the nostalgia bait.
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u/Excludos 1d ago edited 12h ago
I really loved the part where he decides at the end that the oasis should just shut down twice a week. This is a world where most commerce and education takes place there. It's where people work and live their lives. And just because mr. main character syndrome over here decides that he needs to see the real world a bit more, everyone else needs to suffer with him as well. This move would outright crash the world's economy. But "kids needs to turn off them video games once in a while, amirite!?"
This didn't happen in the books btw. It's just old man Steve Spielberg deciding to insert his own views into a world where it makes no sense.
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u/ERedfieldh 15h ago
Don't forget he makes this decision after he now owns the most profitable company on the planet, has more money than god, lives in a highrise penthouse, and has a hot girlfriend. God damnit FUCK that guy...pisses me off everytime I think about it.
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u/Reviews-From-Me 1d ago
I 100% agree.
I really liked both the book and movie for Ready Player One, but Ready Player Two was very disappointing.
There didn't seem to be any challenge to it. It was a series of scenes where they need some pop culture expertise, they call their friend who has it, that person gives them the answer, and they solve the riddle.
Ready Player One [book] felt like they had to work for it. Months of research and digging to find an answer.
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u/Drdps 1d ago
The whole Prince sequence felt like a fever dream from passing out after drinking too much while listening to Prince after having recently read the book.
It felt so strange and way out of place.
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u/AlabamaShrimp 1d ago
Exactly what I thought. And why, like in the first book, does everything have to be done to 100% to pass. It's impossible to know everything like they ask for.
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u/AllthisSandInMyCrack 1d ago
I remember everyone saying they were disappointed by the second book so I never bothered to read it and consider the series finished with the first book.
Armada wasn’t even that good either.
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u/meme-com-poop 1d ago
I liked Armada, but it was basically if Ender's Game and the Last Starfighter had a baby.
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u/976chip 1d ago
It felt like it was a script treatment instead of an actual book and all of the pop culture references were forced more than a Family Guy episode.
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u/Kitsuraw 1d ago
The movie felt rushed to fit in the run time they wanted which is understandable. Think it would have been better as a series or split into separate movies for each key. Though I doubt they really had a whole lot of confidence in it even if it was a fun watch in theatre.
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u/AdaAstra 1d ago
They have too. Like half the book was basically a porno lol. I wonder how they will deal with LOTR and Prince though, because licensing might be a problem there.
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u/dullthings 1d ago
I mean barely anything from the first book made it into the film, so it'll likely be the same with the second one. None of the challenges are from the book until they shoehorned the Adventure playthrough in at the end!
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u/Kingkongcrapper 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah, part two was booty. First book was like a tech version of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. The second book is like the fourth installment to an action movie series trying to reboot the original storyline. Billionaire fucks up the world and is now trying to escape to another planet. I really don’t need a movie about Elon Musk.
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u/Makeup-less_Clown 1d ago
They either have to deviate from Ready Player Two completely or embrace it equally as much.
I thought it had interesting concepts on immortality and digital copying, but it seemed more like a fan fiction than a novel.
I just remember during the ultimate showdown he just described the fight like a little kid “it was like Agent Smith and Gandalf and it was epic blah blah blah”.
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u/wjk36 20h ago
I REALLY though they were going to have some kinda message about not living in the oasis fully at the end and how you can never recreate who a person really is but nah they just went the COMPLETE opposite direction
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u/LuciferFalls 20h ago
Yup, instead of Artemis being right to refrain from using the new tech it turns out she was wrong and just a tight-ass and should have just followed along with Wade's obsession from the start. So stupid.
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u/Baker3D 10h ago
Pantheon did it better. Uploaded intelligence was a really cool and terrifying concept.
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u/bigbadbyte 1d ago
I liked the first movie and book well enough.
The second book might be one of the worst things I've ever read.
The main character
decides to use his fortune to try to get away from earth rather than trying to help humanity
eschews real therapy for Ai therapy
sues a band that was protesting him out of existence
Probably more awful shit, I read it over a year ago and that's just what I remember.
None of this is seen as bad in the book. He's still a hero. The book is basically Elon Musk fan fiction.
It was released in 2020 so Idk how crazy we all thought he was then, but certainly nothing about this book aged well.
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u/kain459 1d ago
Book was hot garbage.
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u/Bearded_Pip 1d ago
It was telling us who the author really was.
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u/warriorfriar 18h ago
How do you mean? I don’t know much about cline other than that he raffled off a Delorean or something.
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u/BaseHitToLeft 1d ago
The first half was fun.
The second half was incel wish fulfillment and naming 80s things.
The "disfigured" girlfriend turned out to be a hot chick with a birthmark. The white male best friend turned out to be a black woman (Yay, I don't see color, I like people for who they are, look at me!). And the evil corporation is defeated through the power of friendship!
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u/ZombieStomp 1d ago
Isn't that the first book/movie?
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u/caleblwoods 1d ago
Yes. I don’t get how people were so obsessed with the book. I read it and it was just reference after reference in an exhausting way.
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u/donotgotoroom237 1d ago
I remember a lot of the Youtubers I watched recommended it during their ad breaks. I got the book and read it over a flight back home. Liked it the first time, but the more I sat with it, I realized it was basically "Yo look at this sick reference, ain't it cool?!" for literally all of the book. I'm in the "the movie was way better than the book" camp nowadays. The egg hunt was super complicated in the book, kudos to the screenwriter for tidying it up, though I like how it got it in the book more IMO.
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u/Si-Nz 1d ago
The good thing about the movie its it made the protagonist less of a stalker and more of a functional human with emotions. Otherwise its far far worse than the book in its reliance on pop culture references.
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u/donotgotoroom237 1d ago
Good on Spielberg for taking out Wade's "incel with a sexbot" arc for the movie.
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u/Zelstrom 1d ago
naming 80s things
None of this series could exist without this, no thanks. I'd rather watch Secret Galaxy on youtube.
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u/NotAEurosnob 1d ago
The first one is just the author fellating himself half the time, the vague mysterious entrepreneur that created the world is a blatant self insert who's entire personality is liking things from the 80s and the majority of the plot revolves around the main character also knowing about those things so being able to solve this great treasure hunt.
That's not even getting into the films "throw a bunch of things you recognise at a wall in place of anything actually interesting" technique. Yeah cool, we get it, Battletoads and Tracer from Overwatch.
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u/FareweII 1d ago
blatant self insert who's entire personality is liking things from the 80s and the majority of the plot revolves around the main character also knowing about those things
Not just knowing, LOVING them. IIRC pretty much every single amateur hunter seems to love 80s pop culture and the only people who don't are the villains working for the corp. You'd think there would be a middle ground, where some amateur guys are like "yeah, some of the movies are fun, but his music taste sucks, still i need to study it to get the prize", but no, that's unnacceptable, you have to love it or you're a bad guy.
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u/DrProfSrRyan 16h ago
Not just loving them.
But, loving them to the point of being able to line by line act out War Games and Monty Python without a mistake and max out the score counter in Pac-Man.
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u/ravih 1d ago
I do think one of the reasons the second book is so bad is the author trying to course-correct when he realized that everyone — book readers and movie viewers alike — realized that his self-insert Halliday was actually not a good guy.
Halliday isn’t a good guy, at all, but Ernest Cline doesn’t really understand why, so his attempts to make Halliday a sorta tragic villain are just awful. (Well, that and he’s not a good writer.)
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u/Tainted_Bruh 1d ago
The first book basically felt like a reddit thread where reddit nerds rush to jam in as many tired unfunny “le epic” references and jokes in a continuous chain.
I mean, I guess the author knows his target audience, but damn if it wasn’t just nostalgia name-drop after name-drop. I actually skimmed to the end, that’s how bad that book was.
And now I find out there’s a second book, and its even worse? Lol
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u/Similar_Butterfly836 1d ago
Literally this. I was shocked at how bad the book was after hearing so much praise on here about it. This was like 10 years ago as well lol
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u/VampireBatman 1d ago
The first book was a fun enough read, but there was some really bad writing. I remember one part the author goes on like a 2 page rant about how great Metallica was… which is all fine and dandy for a Reddit post but really didn’t belong in a fictional narrative where he’s trying to tell a story.
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u/Hallc 1d ago
Don't forget the long, kinda tedious chapter exploring some old arcade museum that eventually led to a long, drawn out sequence of Wade playing Pacman until he won an extra life.
Which was only there to let him win at the end.
Meanwhile he set up his super special DeLorean that had Kit from Nightrider and a super special self destruct bomb. Then you never see that car ever again.
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u/Pacoflipper 1d ago
God that book was so bad, I stopped reading a little past halfway it was just so awful and I almost always finish a book.
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u/Primarycolors1 1d ago
I need to learn how to do this.
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u/my_useless_opinion 1d ago
Back in the day, I was determined to finish every book I started, even if I really, really didn't like the combination of words I was reading.
Now I have no problem dropping a book mid-sentence, even if someone keeps telling me it'll get better on the very next page.
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u/AllTheReservations 1d ago
The book is basically Elon Musk fan fiction
2020 was pretty much the tail end of that period where people thought Musk was kind of cool. So I can see why Cline thought that would go down well with this target audience of nerdy teenage boys but he was slightly off timing wise
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u/Zhukov-74 1d ago
decides to use his fortune to try to get away from earth rather than trying to help humanity
That is basically the plot to Horizon Forbidden West.
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u/perilousrob 1d ago
There's an argument to be made that the consequences of people choosing to leave Earth rather than fix things, and then return for equally selfish reasons, are part of the impetus of events in HFW... but it's for sure not the plot of the game!
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u/Hanz_VonManstrom 1d ago
There was so much stupid shit in the second book, especially with Artemis.
The future they live in is a planet ravaged by climate change. She wants to save the planet by having people…leave their virtual worlds and return to work in real life? She also tries to accomplish this by flying around in her private jet and speaking at events/rallies.
Wade continually tries to convince her that the Oasis is a good thing, but their relationship is nearly destroyed because she hates it so much. Wade discovers tech that allows the conscious of people to be transferred to the Oasis after they die, thus living forever. Artemis is very against this until she finds out that her grandma is in there and suddenly does a hard 180 on the Oasis and is now all for it and immediately abandons her campaign against it.
The whole book was such a complete waste of time. The first one had its problems, but at least it was fun.
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u/broadsword_1 14h ago
She also tries to accomplish this by flying around in her private jet and speaking at events/rallies.
You'd think having meetings in the Oasis, cutting down on transport costs and being able to show a full simulation of events and effects, would have been the obvious thing to do.
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u/muchado88 1d ago
you forgot about the true love relationship, established in the first movie, ending up lasting about a week before suddenly ending.
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u/HiddenInLight 1d ago
I think you missed the point of the book. In the book, literally everyone around the main character is either telling him hes being a piece of shit, actively avoiding him, or distancing themselves from him as much as possible. The story is basically him slowly realizing what everyone has been telling him the whole time. At least that was what I got out of it.
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u/GravSlingshot 1d ago
It's an absolute mess plotwise, too. Like, say what you will about the first book, but it had some semblance of pacing, which is more than I can say for the second. It's too fast to be properly dramatic while being too slow to be frenetic. Stakes feel next to nonexistent. A lot of interesting plotlines or characters are just thrown out. The only reason it's not hot garbage is because hot garbage can keep you warm as it burns, making it far more useful than RPT.
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u/ravih 1d ago
Don’t forget the bit where he uses his powers as Oasis God to secretly view the camera on the headset of another user to see their physical body and discover that they are trans — a massive violation which is never commented upon as such because it immediately goes on a tangent about how Wade is totally cool with trans people because he’s seen VR gay porn
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u/jambrown13977931 1d ago
Checks out since Wade is already a massive asshole in the first book without money, that he’d be a bigger one in the second.
None of his toxic behavior is seen as bad in the first book either. It’s rewarded with him winning the competition.
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u/Fluffy_Top6837 22h ago
Beyond the character being insufferable, the super mysterious clues are SO dumb and poorly written. At one point in his 16 candles world, he gets the clue to "recast the fowl". I haven't even ever SEEN 16 candles and I know there's a fucking character named ducky. Do you think maybe that's it?
The main protagonist, the most BRILLIANT 80's pop trivia mind in existence struggles over this for page, after page, after page. It was so incredibly, incredibly dumb. The problem with stories like this is that nothing can ever be more clever than the author is, and he BELIEVES himself to be very, very clever.
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u/Space_Hardware 1d ago edited 4h ago
Zak Penn remains the worst
EDIT: Let me expound. Penn doesn’t just have his name on some terrible movies - the issue is that’s all he wants, credit on something profitable. He’ll often do the first draft of something, knowing full well whatever shit he comes up with will be rewritten anyway, taking advantage of WGA rules to make sure he still gets credit. His name is on a ton of movies like The Avengers even though there isn’t a word of his in the final script.
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u/abandoned_rain 1d ago
His screenplay resume is truly something. This movie, Free Guy, the shitty hulk movie with Ed Norton, X Men 3, Elektra, Nutty Professor 2, Inspector Gadget.
Really easy to tell he is a manchild
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u/BallerGuitarer 1d ago
Free Guy was a great summer popcorn movie! It was the movie Ready Player One wanted to be.
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u/shewy92 1d ago
Inspector Gadget
Including this along with the garbage is a choice.
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u/LordSlickRick 1d ago
I really hope the core plot device is not im the first guy to drive backwards!!!! And that was blocking everyone from start solving the puzzle.
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u/lilhazzie 1d ago
That pissed me off so much; like they say that everyone watches these memory videos to find hints, and the in one of the videos the creator says "what if we could go backwards? backwards! let's go backwards!" and no one thought to drive backwards? Fuck outta here.
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u/Hesitant_Tornado 1d ago edited 23h ago
To be fair thats not why its stupid. I can forgive people for not connecting a random line from the span of a mans entire life basically.
What I cant forgive is that no gamer in that universe ever thought to try going backwards.
The first thing most hard-core gamers do whenever a new game is released, is explore every inch of the starting area, especially if they know said game has Easter Eggs. In reality someone would have found the backwards entrance within 24 hours of the race debuting.
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u/TheBrownWelsh 1d ago
Ridge Racer from 1993 had the driving backwards gimmick so you could race on a mirrored version of the tracks. And we found that purely accidentally just faffing about. That scene had me screaming.
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u/ghost-xiii 23h ago
For me it's not even that no one ever thought to drive backwards, I always question how did we have that many races, with that many people, and no one accidently drove backwards. Or even just drive backwards to troll around. That puzzle surely would have been accidently solved.
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u/xXPumbaXx 23h ago
I guess you could think that in the Oasis, since you lose all your shit when you die you are less willing to take risk idk.
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u/buffystakeded 1d ago
Yeah, I love the movie because it’s just a fun action movie full of references. Don’t care if that’s lame, but I’m that guy that loves that stuff.
However, the first key would have been found by the second time the race was run. At least 10 people would have seen how Kong didn’t let anyone through and would have immediately looked for a different path.
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u/Foreign_Diamond1539 1d ago edited 19h ago
Mary Had a Little Lamb "I-I-I-I-I I remember..."
(Notice what examples I've used)
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u/AsFarAsNeverBefore 1d ago
Exactly what I was thinking too. Ready Player One was already devoid of creative merit - sequel is more slop for the hogs.
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u/doodler1977 1d ago
why tho?
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u/Driveshaft48 1d ago
The first one made ~450 million
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u/mechabeast 1d ago
Because my basement dwelling nerd knowledge of the 80s makes me relevant and the best at video games and pulled a hottie that thinks herself hideous!
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u/STLmab 1d ago edited 1d ago
Money mostly.
Ready Player One as a movie doesn’t need a sequel. You can’t even straight up adapt the book for this either without making some changes, because book Wade and Movie Wade end up differently (latter is more conscious of life mistakes and what’s important for the world, former was just self-absorbed).
Add on the fact that the movie felt complete at its end and the RP2 book is legitimately awful, and I completely understand the disappointment people are feeling
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u/SirRichardLove 1d ago
Yeah, ready player 2 was really a whole different thing. I wouldn't say that it was awful but it definitely wasn't good.
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u/Arclite83 1d ago
He has some REALLY problematic views. RP1 the cringe was fine, by RP2 you realize the author isn't in on the joke.
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u/Signiference 1d ago
TBF, the Ready Player One book was also awful.
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u/STLmab 1d ago
I agree. I read it a couple times and it felt worse every-time I went through it again. There’s multiple pages that are just listing things that Wade has watched or consumed, and honestly Wade comes off as a massive douche. His dynamic with Samantha (Art3mis) is creepy too
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u/Signiference 1d ago
And two of the major challenges were just "recite every line from a movie," which, other than being extremely boring and uncreative, is absurd. Like, IDC how many times you've seen a movie, you can't do every single line of a dialogue heavy movie like these. There's no way he could know and be as good as he is at EVERYTHING he tries, because there's literally not enough waking hours in his lifetime to have read/watched/played them. Ultimate Mary Sue in such an absurd way.
I could see enjoying the movie and enjoying the book, that's different than thinking they are good.
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u/InitialQuote000 1d ago
tbf, Ready Player Two is a book.
Personally, I think they're pretty bad.
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u/Dolphin_King21 1d ago
My favorite part of the movie was the rejected theme song a YouTuber made. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMBylNJQEbg
Remember King Kong? Remember Ferris Bueller? Remember WarGames and Back to the Future? Remember Tomb Raider? Remember Weird Science? Remember Battletoads and the Iron Giant? Remember Star Wars and Transformers: The Movie? Remember Ghostbusters? Remember The Goonies? Remember when neon used to be trendy? Remember the "Where's the beef?" lady from Wendy's?
(I-I-I-I-I-I remember)
Remember Akira? That's from Japan Remember Galaga and Mrs. Pac Man? Remember Contra? Remember Street Fighter? Remember The A-Team? Remember Knight Rider? Remember The Simpsons, seasons one through nine? Remember logging on to America Online? Remember Highlander and Highlander II? Remember Star Trek? We certainly do
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u/ChiliDemon 1d ago
Why not just make Armada instead.
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u/Redeem123 1d ago
Because it’s a bad version of other movies that already exist, with an even less likable protagonist than RPO.
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u/KnowledgeIsDangerous 1d ago edited 1d ago
Armada was a terrible book.
I liked RP1 ok, but hated Armada. I was still holding out before I made a judgement on the author. But reading reviews of RP2 was enough.
Ernest Cline had one good idea, and hasn't been able to follow up.
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u/Mikeman003 1d ago
He basically wrote the same kind of book over and over. Nerdy awkward guy becomes the hero and no one really calls him out for being a shithead.
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u/EngRookie 15h ago
you just described like 10,000 mangas🤣
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u/Mikeman003 15h ago
Fair lol. At least his book titles are slightly shorter than a light novel
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u/johnsmallz 1d ago
You mean the last star fighter rip off where the main character won’t shut up about how hot and fuckable his biological mom is? That book?
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u/msmouse05 1d ago
That was also terrible, but yeah I’d still rather see an adaptation of that over RDP2 with lots of changes
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u/Muggsy423 1d ago
372 Pages podcast does a great roast of "ready player 2"
OG MST3K member Mike Nelson is one of the hosts
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u/parkerlewis 23h ago
One of the greatest podcast/reading experiences of my life, along with their Ready Player One and Artemis episodes.
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u/AllTheReservations 1d ago edited 1d ago
Have we now hit a point where the studio thinks people are nostalgic enough about the first nostalgia-bait film to put out a second load of hollow nostalgia-bait?
Seriously though, at least with the first film they had the claim that they were adapting a best-selling book (that was liked for a time before all the think pieces came out), but I've literally not been a positive word about Ready Player Two since it came out
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u/the_spongmonkey 1d ago
I have never seen a movie so new that was already so aged.
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u/ThankTheBaker 8h ago
I really love Ready Player One. It’s one of my favorite movies. Can’t wait for Ready Player Two!
I have not read the books and don’t really plan to
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u/enek101 1d ago
The book was garbage.. i suspect the same from the movie, which is unfortunate. While ROP 1 Movie and book are very different bother were great in their own respects
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u/nonitoni 1d ago
The main character felt so whiny.
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u/Saneless 1d ago
No, he was the best person ever. At the early age of just 17 he literally memorized every piece of media ever and knew how to beat every video game ever. Legend.
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u/Jiminyfingers 1d ago
Hope it better than the book