I thoroughly enjoyed it. I read a lot and almost always have a book in progress, but 99% of the time it is non-fiction or an autobiography. "Ready Player One" was the first fiction book I'd read in I don't know how long.
The movie rights were picked up immediately. For the life of me I can't imagine how they can make a movie. It isn't the visuals/effects that are a problem in this case; it's the intellectual property clearances that would cost a fortune. I'm cautiously optimistic that they can work out deals with all of the various corporate entities involved to allow things like footage from WarGames, etc.
I thought about that and it would be extremely easy for a movie company to replace whatever intellectual property they didn't own with something from their own library. In this case Warner Bros. owns the rights so expect something like Harry Potter references to replace
references, etc.
And that would completely ruin it as far as I'm concerned. The author had very specific pop culture references integrated into the story, all of it from the '80s and much of which was/is owned by many different companies, some of which no longer exist (but the IP still is owned by somebody). I'd rather they not make a movie version at all if the solution is to inject something like Harry Potter, which has absolutely nothing to do with the 1980s.
It's been a while since I read it, though, so maybe much of it could be depicted without needing to pay somebody. Things like movie and TV show footage and music would absolutely have to be paid for, and considering the amount of this stuff in the story the budget would be astronomincal. But depicting something like walking through the world of
Zork, or showing characters playing
Joust,
Pac-Man,
Black Tiger, etc., would probably be fine... unless companies like Williams and Romstar, etc. came crawling out of the woodwork to demand payment for showing their three decade old arcade games in a movie. It's things like that that completely kill many movie projects.
