WB Sets Up 'Ready Player One' Rewrite From Eric Eason

Briefly: The video game-inspired All You Need is Kill isn't the only game-related project Warner Bros. has going. In 2010 the studio picked up rights to Ernie Cline's much-loved book Ready Player One, a story about a sort of treasure hunt that takes place in a fully-realized online virtual community.

Ernie Cline originally scripted the feature version of the book (he also wrote the movie Fanboys) but now Variety says that WB is moving forward with the project by hiring Eric Eason to rewrite. Eason also wrote Manito, Journey to the End of the Night, and the recent film A Better Life. (He directed the first two of those films, as well.)

Hit the break for the synopsis of Ready Player One.

In the near future, outcast teenager Wade Watts escapes from his bleak surroundings by logging in to the OASIS, a globally networked virtual utopia where users can lead idyllic alternate lives. When the eccentric billionaire who created the OASIS dies, he offers up his vast fortune as the prize in an elaborate treasure hunt. Along with gamers from around the world, Wade joins the adventure, and quickly finds himself pitted against powerful corporate foes and other ruthless competitors who will do anything, in the oasis or the real world, to reach the treasure first.