‘Ready Player One’ trailer dives deeper into the OASIS

Warner Bros. released a new trailer for Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One,” and it takes a much deeper dive into Ernest Cline’s reference-stuffed digital fantasy world known as the OASIS.

Based on Cline’s best-selling novel, the film follows Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), an ace gamer who lives in a dystopian Ohio in 2045. Like everyone else in society, he escapes his hellish reality by entering the OASIS, where he is an ace gamer known as Parzival.

The OASIS is turned on its head when its late creator, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), announces a system-wide hunt for an Easter egg he’s hidden in the game. Whoever finds it gets control of the OASIS, as well as his entire fortune. With the help of another skilled treasure hunter named Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), Wade goes hunting for the Easter egg before it’s captured by the corporate giant Innovative Online Industries, whose CEO, Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) has hired an army of gamers to find it first.

Cline’s novel was known for dropping references to 80s pop culture in almost every paragraph, but Spielberg’s film will also pull from more recent movies, TV shows, and video games. The Iron Giant, who appeared in the film’s San Diego Comic-Con trailer, can be seen again here, and fans of the hit online shooter “Overwatch” will be surprised to find the game’s most popular character, Tracer, in this trailer running into battle alongside Chun-Li from “Street Fighter.”

“Ready Player One” also stars Simon Pegg and T.J. Miller, with Cline writing the script with Zak Penn (“X-Men: The Last Stand). The film hits theaters March 30.

Watch the trailer above.

More to come…