Ready Player One Budget

What Is the Budget of Ready Player One?

Ready Player One (2018), directed by Steven Spielberg and released by Warner Bros. Pictures, had a production budget of $175,000,000. That is the figure Box Office Mojo lists and the one Variety and The Hollywood Reporter reported at release, when The Hollywood Reporter described it as what the film cost Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow Pictures "to make before a major marketing spend." Other reports ran lower: Deadline gave a net budget of $155,000,000 to $175,000,000 before prints and advertising, The New York Times said the two companies spent at least $155,000,000, and The Numbers lists $150,000,000. Saturation uses $175,000,000, the top of the range reported in the week of release.

The cost was shared. Village Roadshow covered about 35% of the production budget, according to Deadline's sources, and handled distribution in several overseas territories, while Warner Bros. released the film everywhere else. What the money did not buy was star power: Variety noted that there were no A-list stars in a cast led by Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn and Mark Rylance, and The New York Times wrote that, with no sequel or remake to sell and leads who were not household names, the film was left "resting on Spielberg's shoulders."

Key Budget Allocation Categories

Warner Bros. has not published a line-item budget, but the production record shows where most of the money went.

• Visual Effects: Industrial Light & Magic delivered about 900 shots for the OASIS sequences, with Roger Guyett as visual effects supervisor, and Digital Domain added about 300 for the largely live-action scenes in the real world, with Territory Studio contributing. Spielberg met with ILM for three hours, three days a week, and called it "the most difficult movie I've done since Saving Private Ryan."
• Motion Capture and Virtual Production: The OASIS avatars were performed in motion capture, and Digital Domain handled previsualization with The Third Floor, the motion capture and virtual sets powered by game engines. Previsualization supervisor Scott Meadows said Spielberg would "put on a headset and scout the sets and make adjustments" in real time.
• The Overlook Hotel Sequence: The film's tribute to The Shining (1980) was mostly a digital recreation built from high-quality telecine of Stanley Kubrick's film, with the team consulting Kubrick's blueprints. Only a few scenes, such as the Grady twins, needed actors on rebuilt physical sets, and the new footage was given film grain to match the original.
• Licensing Pop Culture: The film is packed with characters and vehicles owned by other studios and publishers, from the DeLorean of Back to the Future (1985) to the robot from The Iron Giant (1999). Spielberg estimated the production cleared about 80% of the copyrighted elements it wanted, and it could not secure the rights to his own Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) from Columbia Pictures.
• Shooting in England: Principal photography ran from June 24 to September 27, 2016, at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, at Solaris House in Surrey and on the streets of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, which stood in for Columbus, Ohio. Caravan homes were partly built in the Ludgate Hill car park, and some Birmingham landmarks were replaced with CGI buildings to create a dystopian future Ohio.

How Does Ready Player One's Budget Compare to Similar Films?

At $175,000,000, Ready Player One was a large bet for Warner Bros. on a story without widely known film or comic book characters behind it, built instead on Ernest Cline's 2011 novel and Spielberg's name. Figures below are Box Office Mojo's.

• The BFG (2016): Budget $140,000,000 | Worldwide $194,670,610. Spielberg's previous big-budget fantasy opened to $18,775,350, which The Hollywood Reporter called a resounding disappointment; Ready Player One cost $35,000,000 more and grossed almost exactly three times as much.
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008): Budget $185,000,000 | Worldwide $786,636,033. Spielberg's last film to open bigger in North America, with $100,137,835, had a franchise behind it; Ready Player One cost $10,000,000 less and grossed 74% as much.
• Minority Report (2002): Budget $102,000,000 | Worldwide $358,372,926. Spielberg's earlier science fiction film without a franchise behind it opened to $35,677,125; Ready Player One opened higher and grossed 63% more worldwide on a budget 72% larger.
• Tron: Legacy (2010): Budget $170,000,000 | Worldwide $400,070,675. One of the earlier films set inside a digital world that Deadline mentioned alongside Ready Player One, it earned more in North America, $172,062,763, but Ready Player One grossed 46% more worldwide because of its overseas business.
• Alita: Battle Angel (2019): Budget $170,000,000 | Worldwide $404,980,543. Another effects-driven adaptation at almost the same cost, it also depended on international markets for 78.8% of its gross, but finished about 31% behind Ready Player One.

Ready Player One Box Office Performance

Ready Player One opened in its first international markets on March 28, 2018, and in the United States and Canada on Thursday, March 29, the start of the Easter weekend, the first Spielberg film released in spring since The Sugarland Express in 1974. It made $12,100,000 on its first day, including $3,750,000 from Wednesday night previews, and $41,764,050 over the Friday to Sunday weekend from 4,234 theaters, and about $53,700,000 over four days, well ahead of the $38,000,000 to $42,000,000 four-day range that tracking had predicted. That was Spielberg's biggest domestic opening since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. IMAX contributed $6,600,000 from 405 screens and 3D showings 35% of the weekend, and PostTrak found that 63% of the audience was male. Overseas the film took $128,000,000 in its first weekend, including $61,652,315 in China, for a global start of about $181,200,000. It fell to second place in its second weekend with $24,600,000, behind A Quiet Place (2018).

China became the film's largest market by a wide margin, at $218,471,784, ahead of $137,715,350 in the United States and Canada, $23,400,000 in Japan, $21,500,000 in France and $21,374,702 in the United Kingdom. Counting the original release and three small re-releases, Box Office Mojo's figures come to $445,803,787 internationally and $583,519,137 worldwide, close to The Numbers' $583,490,172 for the original run alone. Box Office Mojo's headline total of $607,874,422 also includes two later entries for Australia and South Korea whose totals of $9,322,879 and $15,032,406 cannot have come from their only reported weekends, $220 and $23,113, so Saturation leaves them out. For costs, Deadline reported that production and prints and advertising together came to $300,000,000 to $325,000,000, and The New York Times put global marketing at more than $100,000,000. With the $175,000,000 budget, the top of Deadline's range implies about $150,000,000 for prints and advertising, the estimate used below.

At 80%, "Ready Player One" earned roughly $1.80 for every $1 invested.

That is a gross figure, before theaters and distributors take their shares, so it overstates what the studios kept. A better measure is the break-even point Deadline's film finance sources set on opening weekend: a global gross of $440,000,000, made up of $120,000,000 domestic, $120,000,000 from China and $200,000,000 from other markets, would take the film to roughly break-even before participations, residuals and interest. Ready Player One beat each part of that, with $137,715,350 domestic, $218,471,784 from China and $227,332,003 elsewhere, and it also cleared the $420,000,000 to $500,000,000 range that experts gave The Hollywood Reporter. Only 23.6% of the gross came from the United States and Canada and 37% from China alone. On home video it debuted at No. 1 on the NPD VideoScan First Alert disc chart and held the top spot for a second week, and The Numbers estimates domestic DVD and Blu-ray sales at a further $31,080,555.

Ready Player One Production History

Ernest Cline gave producer Dan Farah his film rights more than a year before the novel was published, and Farah, partnering with Donald De Line, brought the project to Warner Bros., which bought the rights in June 2010 for a six-figure sum, according to Deadline, with Cline set to adapt his own book. Eric Eason rewrote Cline's draft, and Zak Penn was later hired to rewrite both, as Village Roadshow Pictures joined as co-financier. De Line and Farah spent about five years developing the script before a draft by Cline and Penn was ready to take to a major director.

Warner Bros. tried to make it Christopher Nolan's next film after Interstellar (2014), but he declined, and the studio drew up a shortlist that included Robert Zemeckis, Edgar Wright, Matthew Vaughn and Peter Jackson. Spielberg signed on in 2015 to direct and produce alongside De Line, Farah and Kristie Macosko Krieger. Olivia Cooke was cast as Art3mis by September 2015 over fellow frontrunners Elle Fanning and Lola Kirke, Ben Mendelsohn joined in January 2016, and Tye Sheridan was confirmed as Wade Watts in February 2016 after a long search, with Simon Pegg and Mark Rylance following that spring. Jack Nicholson, the star of The Shining, was approached to appear but declined because he had retired.

Filming began on June 24, 2016, slightly ahead of its planned July start, and wrapped on September 27. In Birmingham the production used Livery Street in the Jewellery Quarter, the Ludgate Hill car park on Lionel Street and the Digbeth industrial area; a planned explosion at the car park led some residents and businesses to call emergency services because no notice had been given. Filming also took place at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden and at Solaris House, the former Sun Microsystems headquarters in Surrey.

Much of the adaptation was shaped by what could be licensed. Blade Runner was central to the novel, but Blade Runner 2049 (2017) was in production at the same time, and its producers at Alcon Entertainment feared Spielberg's film could hurt its prospects, so Cline and Penn replaced that part of the book with a sequence set in The Shining, for which Spielberg secured the rights as a tribute to his friend Stanley Kubrick. Ultraman, who features heavily in the novel, was tied up in a rights dispute and was replaced by the Iron Giant. Spielberg cut many references to his own films to avoid accusations of vanity, though Cline persuaded him to keep the DeLorean, from a film he had only produced, and he also allowed the Tyrannosaurus rex from Jurassic Park (1993).

John Williams was announced as composer in June 2016 but left in July 2017 to score Spielberg's The Post (2017), and Alan Silvestri took over, quoting his own Back to the Future music at Spielberg's request. Warner Bros. had originally dated the film for December 15, 2017, then moved it to March 30, 2018, to avoid Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), and later brought it forward a day to March 29. It had its world premiere at the Paramount Theatre in Austin on March 11, 2018, at the South by Southwest Film Festival.

The film's picture of a commercial virtual world also outlived its release. It drew comparisons to Meta's investments in the metaverse in the early 2020s, and in 2023 commentators compared the Apple Vision Pro headset, and a scene in Apple's launch video, to the film.

Awards and Recognition

Ready Player One was recognized mainly for its visual effects.

• Academy Awards: Nominated for Best Visual Effects (Roger Guyett, Grady Cofer, Matthew E. Butler and Dave Shirk) at the 91st Academy Awards.
• British Academy Film Awards: Nominated for Best Special Visual Effects.
• Visual Effects Society Awards: Won Outstanding Created Environment in a Photoreal Feature for the Overlook Hotel and Outstanding Virtual Cinematography in a Photoreal Project for the New York race, from five nominations.
• Saturn Awards: Won Best Science Fiction Film, with further nominations for Best Director (Steven Spielberg), Best Music (Alan Silvestri) and Best Special Effects.
• Critics' Choice and Satellite Awards: Nominated for Best Visual Effects at both.
• Teen Choice Awards: Four nominations, including Choice Sci-Fi Movie and acting nominations for Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke.

Critical Reception

Reviews were positive but divided over the film's reliance on nostalgia. Ready Player One holds 71% on Rotten Tomatoes from 443 critics, with an average rating of 6.8/10, and a Metacritic score of 64 out of 100 from 56 critics, indicating generally favorable reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an A-, and PostTrak recorded 82% positive and a 65% definite recommend. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus reads: "Ready Player One is a sweetly nostalgic thrill ride that neatly encapsulates Spielberg's strengths while adding another solidly engrossing adventure to his filmography."

Owen Gleiberman of Variety called it a "coruscating explosion of pop-culture eye candy" and found the Shining sequence "irresistible," but said the film has "more activity than it does layers." Eric Kohn of IndieWire described "an astonishing sci-fi spectacle and a relentless nostalgia trip at once" that "drags a bunch in its final third," and Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com said it works "on the level of technical, blockbuster mastery that Spielberg helped define." Matt Zoller Seitz concluded that the film "is a mess, but it is a fascinating and complex one." The sharpest dissent came from Alonso Duralde of TheWrap, who described "feeling bombarded with images, bored by the lack of an interesting story, and irritated with my own cultural past."