Is Steven Spielberg's Absolute Worst Movie About To Become A Reality?
In Steven Spielberg's 2018 film "Ready Player One," characters log in to the OASIS, a sprawling virtual reality world in which they can exist as avatars decked out in digital clothing, hairstyles, and accessories that reflect their favorite pieces of popular culture. One could model themselves to look like The Iron Giant, drive the DeLorean from "Back to the Future," or literally step into scenes from their favorite movies.
Now Ernest Cline, who wrote the novel on which the film was based, seems to be trying to create a real-world analogue for the OASIS.
Deadline reports that Cline and "Ready Player One" producer Dan Farah are teaming up with a company called Futureverse to launch Readyverse Studios, which aims to "build a destination for fans to explore their favorite stories and IP in the metaverse, leveraging web3, metaverse games and experiences, augmented reality, and virtual reality technologies." The new platform they're building will be called The Readyverse, and Warner Bros. has granted them the rights to incorporate imagery from the "Ready Player One" movie into their new venture.
That makes it seem as if, when this launches, it could feel like a straight recreation of the OASIS. But don't get your hopes up.
The most crucial element of The Readyverse is missing
The primary draw of "Ready Player One," both as a book and a movie, is the notion of entering a virtual world in which all of your favorite characters are essentially up for grabs. But here in the real world, things are much more complicated: The Readyverse may have the rights to "Ready Player One," but crucially, they don't yet have the rights to all of the popular intellectual property featured in the movie.
"We've already begun conversations quietly with a few major studios and significant rights holders of beloved IP and they're all leaning into figuring out collaborations with us," Farah told THR. "Everyone's really excited about this being the way to bring their IP to the metaverse."
Translation: Unless the proper deals get hammered out, and there's no guarantee they will, participants will not see the "Back to the Future" DeLorean or the Iron Giant or Halo's Master Chief or any other piece of major IP in the Readyverse. If the platform were to launch today, it sounds like the only pop culture-related thing customers would see would be some of the generic locations that appear in the movie, and maybe a character made for the film like Wade Watts/Parzival or Samantha Cook/Art3mis. That's little more than an empty shell when compared to what's depicted in the OASIS.
Even if this company was somehow able to convince every major IP rights holder to fork over the rights to include recognizable characters in this new venture, consumers have not yet shown signs that they're actually interested in participating in the metaverse in the way these companies seem to envision. (Just look at the failure of Facebook's own Metaverse.)
Maybe that will change one day. Maybe the Readyverse will even be the platform to usher in that era of entertainment. But if society gets to a point where people are as invested in the Readyverse as the "Ready Player One" characters are in the OASIS, whoever is left in the real world will be dealing with the consequences for a long, long time.