LOS ANGELES — Steven Spielberg aced his test.

“Ready Player One,” a nostalgia-soaked science-fiction adventure that marked a high-wire attempt by Mr. Spielberg, 71, to return to his crowd-pleasing roots, arrived to $53.2 million in ticket sales over the four-day Easter weekend in North America. Overseas audiences chipped in an additional $128 million, with Chinese ticket buyers turning out in particular force.

Those results, boosted by IMAX and other premium-priced, large-format screenings, easily make “Ready Player One” the No. 1 movie in the world. Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow spent at least $155 million to make the movie, which carried more than $100 million in global marketing costs.

Going into the weekend, box office analysts had feared that “Ready Player One” might arrive to as little as $38 million in ticket sales in the United States and Canada. Its stars, Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke, are not household names. Its story line — teenagers in a dystopian future search for treasure inside a virtual-reality world called the Oasis — was exceedingly difficult to explain in marketing materials, especially without resorting to spoilers.