A little story of how Ready Player One got ahead Robopocalypse as Steven Spielberg’s next film.
Let me tell you a short story. Back in the day, I was working as a features editor at a very large Russian video game magazine. As part of this job, I was trying to arrange interviews with some up and coming American writers, who has just published their new sci-fi novels. One was the amazing Daniel H. Wilson (Robopocalypse) and the other one was the incredibly talented Ernest Cline (Ready Player One).
At that time Daniel was super big and we just heard the news that the rights for the film version of his incredible book were sold and Steven Spielberg was to direct the movie. Daniel was very excited and happy to see Robopocalypse, talking about the dangers of conscious artificial intelligence, being handled by one of the most successful directors in the world, who handled Minority Report and AI.
However, it was never meant to be. For some reason (probably the classical schedule issues) Spielberg decided to move to other projects and eventually picked up Ready Player One. This novel about geek culture, virtual reality, and MMO games became the director’s next big flick. Today we see the first shot of the upcoming movie. It would be awesome to see both of these films, but things just didn’t work out. Which is a great shame.
The moral of the story is kind of absent. I guess, In Hollywood, you never know how the whole thing is going to end up. Even if you’re sure in smth, it might change at the very last moment. So always be on the look out for that ‘black swan’.