Trivia / Ready Player One (2018)

---

• Acting for Two: All of the actors playing the main characters also provide the voices and motion capture for their avatars. In the case of Aech and Sho, voice filters were used for their avatars to disguise their real voices.
• Blooper: When Wade goes into his hideout just before his virtual meeting with Sorrento, it's daylight out; sunlight is even pouring through his windows. When he (urgently) leaves after the meeting is over, it's night. The meeting only took a few minutes, so it's doubtful that much time ought to have passed.
• California Doubling: The scenes set in Ohio were filmed in Birmingham, England.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: The Japanese dub features actor and singer KENN as Wade.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Yumiko Kobayashi voices Zhou in the Japanese dub.
• Defictionalization: The closest thing to a real virtual Easter Egg hunt like the one in the movie was the promotional event in Roblox, in which clues for the three keys and a golden egg hidden in four Roblox games were given and players had to figure them out.
• Fake American: Olivia Cooke (Samantha / Art3mis), Simon Pegg (Og), Ralph Ineson (Rick), Mark Rylance (Halliday) and Hannah John-Kamen (Zandor) are British, while Ben Mendelsohn (Sorrento) is Australian. Similarly, due to being filmed in Birmingham, almost all the minor and supporting roles are played by Brits.
• Fake Nationality: The Japanese Toshiro Yoshiaki / Daito is played by Win Morisaki, who is Burmese.
• Meaningful Release Date: This film released during Easter weekend 2018, which is fitting for a movie that's all about finding an Easter egg.
• Missing Trailer Scene: In the book, Wade must defeat an opponent in the arcade game "Joust" - and one of the trailers shows players riding winged creatures in what appears to be live-action Joust. Technically, the scene does still appear in the film, as we see a whole army of them going against the scorpion mechs just moments before being introduced to Aech on Planet Doom; the thing that's missing is the shot of a Napoleon avatar holding Excalibur above his head, riding on the back of a scorpion mech as it grabs an Joust ostrich and reverts it back into an egg, as seen in the San Diego Comic Con teaser trailer.
  • There's additional shorter clipped sections from scenes presented in the film that are presented in the trailers. They include, but are not limited to:
    • 1. Showing Rick in the real world, still standing in the living room of the Aunt Alice's trailer (as seen in the film), holding something virtual, with the information on Gregarious 120 on the display (showing that Rick didn't lose the artifact hunt due to Wade's poor gloves, but that he dropped his guard when getting ahold of the item and was taken out by Daito).
    • 2. Aech knocking Z down while attempting a high five inside of a Personal Shopping Booth at Avatar Outfitters (in the film, you see Aech and Z heading through a green glowing entrance talking about how 100,000 coins showed up in Z's account when he took the key. The shot cuts showing the Cataclyst with Aech asking what it is, with the Personal Shopping Booth behind him. In the Art of Ready Player One, it shows art of the scene of what the shopping menu is like in the booth, with a copy of Wade's avatar acting like a mirror and displaying armor he's browsing).
    • 3. In one of the images released by Entertainment Weekly's First Look Exclusive, there's a photo that appeared to be a scene where Samantha, in the real world after her escape from IOI, finds a whole group of people getting up off the ground from the haptic vest shock after their avatars died due to the Catacylst.
    • 4. Another image from the EW First Look Exclusive image includes a shot of Rick, Aunt Alice and Wade that was not featured in the film itself. It shows Aunt Alice wearing her OASIS visor with Rick to her right and Wade behind Rick, sitting at the counter, looking at the both of them in the kitchen with a cereal bowl in front of him.
• Multiple Languages, Same Voice Actor: In the Japanese dub, Win Morisaki reprises his role as Daito. Oddly enough and despite his Japanese name, he is Burmese.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: Given the positively immense amount of cameos and references contained in the film, needless to say, rumors that certain characters or objects can be spotted in the movie at one or more points in the movie have gone flying. One of the most persistent rumors is that you can spot Homestuck or Undertale characters (specifically fan-favorite Sans in the latter case) during the climax.
• Production Posse: The second collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Simon Pegg after The Adventures of Tintin (2011), and the third collaboration between Spielberg and Mark Rylance after The BFG and Bridge of Spies.
• Promoted Fanboy: You can tell Ernest Cline is absolutely ecstatic about working directly with Steven Spielberg.
• Prop Recycling: Mentioned in a behind the scenes article, this happened with most of the video game properties featured in the film, with character and prop assets given to Industrial Light & Magic. This is also the reason why the 2014 versions of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show up, as ILM retained their models from those movies.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor: Lena Waithe, who played the lesbian Helen Harris/Aech, is a lesbian in real-life.
• Real-Life Relative: Two of the Latin American Spanish dub's additional voices, Alejandro and Alondra Hidalgo, are real-life siblings.
• Release Date Change: Was originally scheduled to be released on December 15, 2017 but was ultimately pushed back to March 29.
• Screwed by the Lawyers:
  • Even though Cline's original novel prominently featured Ultraman fighting Mechagodzilla, Warner Bros. replaced the character with the titular protagonist of The Iron Giant due to the then-ongoing legal dispute between Tsuburaya Productions and Chaiyo Productions over who owned the rights to the character. Mechagodzilla managed to make it into the movie for the climatic final battle. To twist the knife further, Tsuburaya and Chaiyo finally resolved the issue, during the first week of the film's release in theaters.
  • Avoided with Sonic the Hedgehog, who makes a cameo appearance in the final film. Since Paramount was making a feature film adaptation at the time, Warner Bros. met up with Sega and Paramount to work out a deal that kept him in the movie, an arrangement similar to what Disney did with the two in regards to both Sonic and Dr. Eggman's appearances in Ralph Breaks the Internet.
• Self-Adaptation: Ernest Cline co-wrote the film's screenplay.
• Significant Reference Date: A movie about finding easter eggs was released on Easter weekend. March 29 also happened to be author Ernest Cline's birthday.
• Swan Song: In the Japanese dub, this was one of the final voice acting works Tetsuo Goto (as James Halliday) did before dying of esophageal cancer in November 2018.^note Technically speaking, his final voice acting work was the Japanese dub of Mortadelo y Filemón live-action film as El Super, according to Yōhei Tadano, Mortadelo's Japanese voice actor.
• Two Voices, One Character: In some foreign-language dubs (including Japanese, Italian, and European and Latin American Spanish), Zhou and Sho are voiced by two different people.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Christopher Nolan, Robert Zemeckis, Matthew Vaughn, Peter Jackson and Edgar Wright were all considered to direct the film.
  • The first draft of the screenplay involved Wade going through a recreation of Blade Runner as the second challenge before it was changed to a reenactment of The Shining because Blade Runner 2049 was filming at the same time. Interestingly enough, Warner Bros. holds the rights to both films.
  • Before his untimely death from Alzheimer's disease, Gene Wilder was offered the role of James Halliday, but he politely declined. Michael Keaton was also considered.
  • Nick Robinson, Nat Wolff and Dalton Vaughn were considered for the role of Wade Watts.
  • Elle Fanning and Lola Kirke were considered for the role of Art3mis.
  • The film's score was originally going to be composed by Spielberg's Associated Composer, John Williams, but due to scheduling conflicts, he left and was replaced with Alan Silvestri. Hilariously, this means an unexpected reunion occurs of Spielberg, Silvestri and a certain Delorean...
  • Spielberg decided against featuring references to any of his own films, though luckily this doesn't extend to his producing other directors' work like Back to the Future. Despite that, a number of VFX artists at Industrial Light & Magic were determined to sneak in as many references as they can and hope Spielberg didn't catch all of them.
  • Due to the artbook for the film's release and some of the pre-production artists posting their work online, there are a few things that were cut or changed from the film. For example, for The Shining Challenge, it would have shown a top-down view of the Overlook being a maze with Danny riding his iconic big-wheel, Aech moving down a hall composed of multiple copies of Jack's arms with axes, and it would have also shown Parzival and Art3mis in a mind-bending and setting bending trip in the Overlook's bathroom (it becoming a centrifuge-like structure in homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey), and being shrunken down in a Land of the Giants trip through the halls of the Overlook, being pursued by Topiary animals that weren't in the original film, but in the book. Some early production art showed Art3mis and Parzival's Zero-G dance being similar to how it was described in the book, but with light. Also cut from the film, but pre-production art turning up for it, is Parzival's Firefly-class transport, The Vonnegut (though a Firefly is still seen in the film with two scenes, the inside is never shown and it is not expressed as being his). And also cut is i-R0k's space transport, a Colonial Marines' dropship from the movie Aliens. There were also alternate OASIS rigs for Aech's van considered for the real world scenes, which one of them would have had two "hamster ball" rigs instead of the wire rigs only that was in the film.
  • Jack Nicholson was approached to make an appearance in the film, possibly reprising his legendary role as Jack Torrance. However, Nicholson declined the offer as he is retired since How Do You Know.

---