10 Upcoming Blockbusters You Should Be Worried About

3. Ready Player One

Steven Spielberg always felt like a strange choice to direct Ready Player One, despite his well-earned reputation as one of the greatest directors in history. It stems more from the fact that the source material is so steeped in 1980s pop culture, of which Spielberg was a huge part, that he had to remove the script's references to himself and his movies so people wouldn't think it was a vanity project.

The recent first trailer was fairly exposition-heavy and not very 'Spielbergian'; the visuals of fully-CGI car chases and battlefields, dystopian futures and young adult protagonists being hounded by an older villain could have come from any number of recent blockbusters, and don't stand out as the work of a man labelled as a 'cinematic game-changer' in the same trailer.

Not to say that the 70 year-old legend is losing his touch, just that his dramatic projects have generally been much better than his forays into blockbuster territory over the last decade or so. So far, everything about Ready Player One seems like generic sci-fi with some recognizable characters thrown in, a problem the marketing needs to make clear or this could mark another high-profile miss for Spielberg after The BFG.