Ready Player One Could Have Had An Awesome Lord Of The Rings Sequence
The second battle of Helms Deep was almost a thing...
As everyone who has seen Steven Spielberg's excellent (but oddly divisive) Ready Player One will be well-aware, The OASIS-set adventure is so steeped in Easter Eggs, references and gags that spotting them all is basically a full-time job. It's also an extremely rewarding experience that demands multiple rewatches to fully appreciate the level of detail that went into putting all of those Eggs in there.
But some of the best Easter Eggs didn't even make it into the movie - and that's not just the Steven Spielberg references that the director spotted and got excised. As spotted by ScreenRant, the section of the movie dedicated to the third task glosses over how IOI solve the clue to the location of Halliday's video game task and skips to them being in Sector 14 and then working out that Anorak's castle is their intended target. But as hinted by an Easter Egg cluster in the background of one scene, they actually explored other castles first.
A whiteboard behind IOI's agents reveals that they had visited Hyrule from The Legend Of Zelda, Miraz's Castle from The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Princess Peach’s Castle from Super Mario and Isengard, Minas Morgul and the Hornburg (at Helm's Deep) from the Lord of the Rings franchise.
The others are all interesting and would have made good nods, but imagine the final battle in Ready Player One happening on the fields of Helm's Deep or before Isengard... Now that would have been a recipe for an even cooler sequence. It's almost a shame they didn't go with that decision to make another picture perfect homage sequence as they did for The Shining.