Steven Spielberg has found his player for Ready Player One.
Tye Sheridan makes perfect sense for the role, and he's certainly earned his bona fides, working hard over the last few years. Cast by no less than Terrence Malick in Tree Of Life, he's since wracked up a solid filmography of films like Joe, The Stanford Prison Experiment, and his work in Mud alone would make him worth putting at the top of every casting list for films looking for actors of a certain age.
He's putting in his blockbuster time, too, with a role as Cyclops in X-Men Apocalypse this summer. With some of the returning cast wrapping up their contracts this time (Fox has got to be weeping about the end of the Jennifer Lawrence deal), it's important that some of the new mutants they introduce in this film be strong enough to build films around in the future, and certainly there's plenty of room left to tell good Cyclops stories considering how completely they screwed up the character writing for him in the first two X-Men films.
But Ready Player One is a different level of things by virtue of that director. Ernie Cline's book, a Willy Wonka for fans of video games and the '80s, has evidently become something pretty special according to people close to the film, people who have seen some of what they're working on. It's going to be dense with pop culture references, and I'm curious to see how Spielberg approaches adapting a book that spends no small part of its focus on paying tribute to Steven Spielberg.
The piece by Borys Kit and Rebecca Ford details just how many people they looked at since starting this process, and it's understandable. The film is set in a horrible dystopic near-future where a virtual world called the Oasis has become incredibly important, and the death of the creator of the Oasis kicks off a sort of digital scavenger hunt. Sheridan will be joined (so far) by Olivia Cooke and Ben Mendesohn.
Warner just recently moved the date for the film, so you can expect Ready Player One in theaters March 30, 2018.