Photo : Warner Bros.

Attendees at this year’s SXSW are about to go from one overwhelming confluence of brands, entertainment properties, and general pop-culture loudness to another, with Variety reporting that Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One will make its world premiere at the Austin-based festival this Sunday night. The film has been scheduled as the festival’s traditional “secret” screening, with organizers confirming this weekend that it’ll be showing the film to audiences for the first time ever tomorrow night.


Spielberg’s film—based on Ernest Cline’s bestseller about a virtual reality scavenger hunt built around ’80s pop culture shibboleths—opens proper on March 29, to the delight and/or consternation of people with varying views on the movie’s full-force assault on the nostalgia centers of the American brain. If nothing else, it’ll be fascinating to see whether the master director can make the most of Cline’s massively popular book, or if the film’s major bursts of creativity will start and stop with a poster of The Matrix with an internet elf boy’s face Photoshopped over Keanu Reeves.