8 Upcoming Movies That Will Be Nothing Like You're Expecting

6. Ready Player One

Ready Player One Iron Giant
Warner Bros.

The Expectation: A straight adaptation of the book.

Why That's Not The Case: Ernest Cline's Ready Player One is one of the most popular books in recent memory, making the forthcoming movie adaptation an inevitable outcome.

That popularity also made it likely that the movie would stick closely to the source material, so as not to change anything about a story that resonated with millions and millions of people.

But according to one of its stars, the movie will be a surprise to even die-hard fans of the novel.

At the premiere of his latest film, Dunkirk, Mark Rylance chatted to Vanity Fair and revealed that Spielberg's Ready Player One will be "an original story", with the director introducing "new puzzles and keys so that the people who read the book will still not know how it’s going to work out".

He didn't divulge any further information, but he makes it sound like the film will retain all the pop-culture references that permeated the book, but spin a new tale around them.

That sounds like a risky move that could potentially alienate the people that made the book such a success, but with the legendary Steven Spielberg at the helm, you have to assume that it will work out for the best.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!