10 Movies That Tried To Exploit Nostalgia (And Won)

9. Ready Player One

Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One is surely the most blatantly nostalgia-baiting movie ever made.

The glossy adaptation of Ernest Cline's sci-fi adventure novel takes place primarily in a virtual reality environment called OASIS, where players are able to select their own avatars ripped from pop-culture.

As a result, large portions of the film are awash with literally hundreds of iconic characters from movies, video games, and comic books.

While many of these references are fairly contemporary, there are a ton of undeniably pandering callbacks to classic nerd culture staples from the 80s in particular.

The most aggressively nostalgic of these cameos include Back to the Future's DeLorean, Jurassic Park's T-rex, and The Iron Giant, while there's also an entire sequence devoted to homaging Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (quite brilliantly, admittedly).

Ready Player One's treatment of nostalgia is more tolerable than most if only because it's such an inherent facet of both the movie and Cline's source material.

Moreover, Spielberg ultimately passes sly comment on the tendency for overzealous fans to lose themselves in these worlds while neglecting the real one, ensuring the film is more than just a hollow - if visually stunning - exercise in exploitation.

In addition to scoring positive reviews, Ready Player One grossed an impressive $582.9 million worldwide, ensuring a sequel will be on the way soon enough, though probably without Spielberg.