The following contains minor spoilers for the book Ready Player One which may also foreshadow the film adaptation.
Ready Player One is a story so full of references that it's impossible for the marketing to keep them all secret. Of course, since those references are sort of the main reason the story even exists, showing them off is sort of the point. A new ad spot includes a great one that we don't read about in the novel. Check out Parzival, the OASIS avatar of Tye Sheridan, going incognito doing his best Clark Kent impression. Check it out.
The 60-second ad spot, posted by FilmTrailerZone, gives the viewer a very brief overview of Ready Player One's main selling point, the digital world that is the OASIS. It contains a few of the pop culture references that we've seen before, like the Spartan soldiers of the Halo video game series and the Iron Giant, but it also includes one reference that's brand new. A brief sequence has the character of Art3mis setting up Parzival with a suit and a pair of glasses, she even tells him that he needs to look like Clark Kent. After saying he won't wear it, we cut to him in the suit and glasses, hair parted appropriately, looking exactly like a virtual Christopher Reeve. We even get a bit of John Williams iconic theme from 1978's Superman, which is still one of the best pieces of film music ever written.
The trailers for Ready Player One have shown us that the movie version will do some things differently from what took place in the novel and this scene would be one of them. There is no scene in the book where Parzival puts on a suit for any reason. He appears to be infiltrating someplace and doesn't want to be recognized, and while there is an important part of the book where something similar happens. That infiltration is done in the real world, not the OASIS, and Wade Watts, the real-life controller of Parzival, does so completely on his own, without the help or even the knowledge of Art3mis. This means this scene is either a drastically reworked version of what happens in the book, or an entirely new sequence.
Still, here's hoping this sequence ends with Parzival pulling open the shirt to reveal his avatar armor beneath, complete with more of the Superman theme. Does he have his own logo?
While Ready Player One certainly won't contain every popular reference from the novel, it's filling in the gaps with other popular references, which will make the movie an easter egg hunt in more ways than one. Ready Player One hits theaters March 29.
