8 Years Ago, Steven Spielberg’s $608M Pop Culture Mash-Up Made The Shining Family Friendly – Now It’s a Streaming Success Again

There is no one who can do family blockbuster movies quite like Steven Spielberg. The iconic filmmaker known for movies such as Jaws, E.T. – the Extra-Terrestrial, and Jurassic Park has never been too far away from his next big theatrical release. Back in 2018, Spielberg was responsible for adapting an already ambitious novel about a future where virtual worlds were the norm and packing it with so many pop culture and movie references that there are some small nuanced moments that still being discovered now. There are not many family blockbuster movies that can boast the inclusion of the 1966 Batmobile, Back to the Future‘s Delorean, Jurassic Park‘s T-Rex and a whole sequence based on Stanley Kurbick’s version of The Shining, but Spielberg managed to pack all that and more into Ready Player One. Now, eight years on, the film is a streaming hit again on the Apple Store chart.

Ready Player One is based on the novel by Ernest Cline, with a story set in the not-too-distant future where people escape a dystopian reality by way of a vast virtual reality simulation called the OASIS, where “players” can meet up, become part of contests, and live a much more engaging and fulfilling life than their poverty-stricken real one. Among those frequently entering the OASIS is Wade Watts, who joins a massive Easter egg hunt across several virtual worlds instigated by the original creator of the OASIS, James Halliday. Whoever can track down all the Easter eggs first will win a substantial amount of wealth and become the owner of the whole virtual universe. Cline’s novel included several sequences that worked in novel form, such as Wade playing an old computer game to find one of the Easter eggs, but to put the story on the big screen, Spielberg pulled a lot of strings to make the biggest crossover event in cinema history.

Ready Player One Is the Ultimate Pop-Culture Mash-Up

Thanks to the convoluted mess that many franchises have found themselves in when it comes to rights issues, there are very few opportunities for characters from unrelated franchises to ever appear in the same movie universe. Ready Player One blew all that aside and in one of its biggest sequences saw the Iron Giant standing alongside Mechagodzilla, Lara Croft, Battletoads, Batman, Chucky, Freddy Krueger, Robocop, He-Man, and even the Cyclops from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, with many other vehicles, monsters, heroes and villains also getting a brief moment of screentime. Before that epic battle sequence, another part of the movie saw Spielberg replace Cline’s segment in which Wade reenacts the 1983 video game WarGames with a trip into the world of Stephen King via the 1980 movie, The Shining.

As Wade sets out to find one of the Easter eggs he is looking for in the movie, he finds himself walking the familiar halls of the Overlook Hotel, with all the eerie horrors of Kubrick’s movie playing to a PG-13 audience. After digitally recreating the world of The Shining, the sequence is a thrilling race against the dark evil of the hotel that removed the more gory elements but left plenty of the creepy atmosphere intact, turning the horror classic into a gateway to the world of Stephen King that a new generation could watch without being given too many nightmares. This sequence alone is a good enough reason to check out the film if you haven’t already, and with Halloween approaching there couldn’t be a better time to do just that. However, the film’s resurgence right now could be based on several other factors, with a new graphic novel being released and rumors of a sequel movie being in the works circulating once more. Either way, Ready Player One is a film that requires at least two watches to fully appreciate, and it seems that many have been logging back into the OASIS to do just that. You can watch Spielberg’s take on The Shining in the clip below.

Should Ready Player One get a sequel? Cline’s continuation is right there ready and waiting. Let us know what you think in the comments.