Ready Player One posters

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‘Ready Player One’ posters are getting dragged on Twitter

These posters are here to kill your '80s nostalgia.

Photo of Tiffany Kelly 

Tiffany Kelly

Internet Culture

Posted on Mar 7, 2018   Updated on May 21, 2021, 10:33 pm CDT

Ready Player One doesn’t hit theaters until the end of the month, but people are already roasting the movie on Twitter for its cringe-worthy posters. The posters mimic those of popular science fiction films of the ’80s, including Blade Runner, Back to the Future, and Labyrinth.

Someone at Warner Bros. apparently decided that this idea was really clever. The result is something that could easily be mistaken for a parody of the film.

For those who aren’t familiar with Ready Player One, it’s an adaptation of Ernest Cline’s popular 2011 dystopian novel of the same name. The novel is set in the year 2044, and people are now so obsessed with virtual reality devices that they have neglected the world around them. The VR world is called the OASIS, and when founder James Halliday dies, he sets up a contest for people to compete for ownership of the company. The competition is devised like a video game, and, because Halliday was obsessed with ’80s pop culture, the winner must also know everything there is to know about ’80s culture to win. The protagonist, Wade Watts, is a teenager who initially spends his days consuming pop culture and exploring the OASIS instead of interacting with other people IRL. The story makes it clear that is lifestyle is obviously not healthy, and interacting with people in the real world is necessary and good.

Still, Watts’ pop culture knowledge is seen as valuable. Clearly, Warner Bros. agrees, and it thinks that all the ’80s references will hook people into seeing the movie. But the posters end up coming off as a massive self-own, and a lot of people hate them.

https://twitter.com/standardman/status/971150565668474881

https://twitter.com/hooooouuuuooooo/status/971142061616521221

https://twitter.com/Airoehead/status/971209396704301056

https://twitter.com/SarooBear/status/971162636225261568

https://twitter.com/EscoBlades/status/971123171113029632

Since the posters already look like a bad internet Photoshop job—why not create posters that are even worse?

https://twitter.com/kateleth/status/971126379281444864

Really, why does Watts’ OASIS avatar, Parzival, look this terrible?

https://twitter.com/Mardcon/status/971126562413273088

The internet accepted the challenger and made some new Ready Player One posters.

https://twitter.com/darth/status/971138490128769024

It’s hard to tell which ones are the real posters—and which ones the internet created.

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*First Published: Mar 7, 2018, 8:23 am CST

Tiffany Kelly

Tiffany Kelly is the culture editor at Daily Dot. Previously, she worked at Ars Technica and Wired. Her writing has appeared in several other print and online publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Popular Mechanics, and GQ.

Tiffany Kelly