Ready Player One, the hit sci-fi novel that’s about to be a hugely profitable Steven Spielberg film, has become a favorite punching bag online. It’s been roundly mocked as a hodge-podge of geek culture references and wish-fulfillment without enough plot or heart to hold it together, and one meme captures this criticism better than any other: “Ready Player One (2018).”
Ready Player One‘s protagonist is a young man who uses his knowledge of ’80s geek trivia to save the world (and the virtual world where future humans spend much of their time). The main thing people seem to hate about it is how frequently those references to old movies, books, and video games come up, and how much value the story places on them.
Accordingly, the game of this meme is to find any photo that mashes up two or more well-known geek culture franchises and caption it “Ready Player One (2018).”
There’s no better illustration of RPO than this car with the license plate “JEDI 007.”
READY PLAYER ONE (2018)
Dir: Steven Spielberg pic.twitter.com/CZ3qQYTOyj
— Stuart Wellington (@flophousecat) March 6, 2018
This meme is especially funny because one of the cars in Ready Player One is a Back to the Future DeLorean with the brain of Knight Rider‘s KITT and the Ghostbusters-inspired license plate “Ecto-88.” As you can see, some of these memes are only a slight exaggeration of the movie they’re spoofing.
Let’s take a look at some more examples. Some of them use the trope known as “Two Things,” where two popular nerdy franchises are combined for no logical reason—it’s been prevalent since 2013, and it’s still a depressingly common trend in t-shirt designs. Others attack aspects of the movie’s “save the virtual world” plot by depicting dorks in VR goggles. Either way, these memes are derisive and pretty funny.
https://twitter.com/GraafenBlackpaw/status/971181396537507841
https://twitter.com/jeffwtm/status/966346000414556161
Ready Player One (2018) pic.twitter.com/ntQkTrGg01
— dDx (@ddx_exe) February 17, 2018
https://twitter.com/julian_assele/status/962750359897767936
https://twitter.com/rose_emoji/status/964538605996830720
Ready Player One (2018) pic.twitter.com/eSEMsHu1WP
— raj (@goddamnimglam) February 21, 2018
READY PLAYER ONE (2018) | Dir. Steven Spielberg
DP: Janusz Kaminski #OnePerfectShot pic.twitter.com/QRWIkb0ssd— Todd in the Shadows (@ShadowTodd) February 22, 2018
https://twitter.com/bburbank/status/971210908373405697
Ready player one (2018) pic.twitter.com/BxDMi24PVS
— Jojo(They/Them) @ Momocon2024 (@shutupjojo_) February 28, 2018
Ready player one (2018) pic.twitter.com/HW2pxEzMZW
— Ranch boi (@ranch_boi311) February 26, 2018
Picking on Ready Player One may be a new trend, but this basic format has been popular on Twitter for at least a year. One of the best memes of early 2017 was using movie titles to caption screengrabs from the reality show Jersey Shore.
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010) pic.twitter.com/vtPzjh3El6
— robin dabank (@brandnxxw) December 31, 2016
This isn’t the first meme to attack Ready Player One, either. When Warner Bros. released variant RPO posters that mimicked the style of iconic ’80s films like Blade Runner, critics made their own posters. Blade Runner? More like Paul Blart, Mall Cop.
https://twitter.com/darth/status/971138490128769024
In spite of the online backlash, Ready Player One will probably be a huge financial success. For a lot of moviegoers, a special-effects-heavy Spielberg flick full of familiar ’80s references isn’t a bad thing.
