The movie faded from memory awfully quickly after it was released in March 2018, so it’s easy to forget how much of a hit Ready Player One actually was. A box office haul of $582 million makes it the fifth highest-grossing effort of Steven Spielberg’s entire career, which is an impressive statistic when you consider he’s the single most commercially successful director in the history of cinema.
Critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes rated the literary adaptation at a respective 72% and 77%, making it all the more strange that you hardly ever hear anybody talking about the action-packed nostalgia rush. Author Ernest Cline’s follow up novel Ready Player Two hit shelves in November of last year, and the following month he announced that the big screen version was already in the early stages of development.
That’s news to leading man Tye Sheridan, though, who admitted in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter that he didn’t know anything about Ready Player Two, even if he’s a self-confessed fan of the source material.
“Yeah, I read it. It’s interesting. I love Ernie. I love all the places that he’s able to go and the worlds that he’s able to imagine. So it’s always fun reading his books. And in regard to a sequel of the film, I have no idea where they’re at or what the talks are at the studio. It’s just not up to me.”
You’d have thought that the sequel to a Steven Spielberg blockbuster that earned over half a billion dollars would be a priority for Warner Bros., but the studio have yet to officially announce Ready Player Two as being actively in the works. Then again, somebody else could step into the director’s chair, but that would also increase the pressure on a theoretical replacement by having to try and top what one of the all-time greats brought to the table first time out.