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One of the upcoming movies that a lot of people seemed to really want is the sequel to Space Jam. The original movie combined the Looney Tunes with the most popular basketball player ever and a Nike commercial, and cemented itself in nostalgic history. Moviegoers thought that sequel starring today's version of Michael Jordan was something that really needed to happen, and somehow those fans (Warner Bros) willed Space Jam: A New Legacy starring LeBron James into existence.
We recently got our first real look at Space Jam: A New Legacy in the form of the film's first trailer, and the result was...interesting? While the new Space Jam will contain basketball and it will have Looney Tunes, it will also have a lot more. The trailer reveals a movie that is basically the WB cinematic universe, with references to everything from Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, to Hanna-Barbera cartoons and more. It's reminding people a lot of another movie they've seen before, and not the original Space Jam. Instead, it's more like Ready Player One.
Ready Player One was about a virtual reality video game where essentially any pop culture property you could think of existed. Those properties took the form of different worlds within the game space, and here we're getting something very similar. Between the original novel and the Steven Spielberg film based on it, there were almost more easter eggs and references than there was plot-- because in many ways the references were the plot. While it's unclear from the trailer just how important all these references are to the movie itself, it does appear they'll be all over the movie, and much like Ready Player One, there are going to be an insane number of character appearances to sift through.
In the end, if it weren't for the basketball game at the center of the plot and the fact that the main human actor is an actual professional basketball player, then Space Jam: A New Legacy would be nearly unrecognizable as a Space Jam film. There's so much more going on here that was never part of the original 1996 original starring Michael Jordan. It's difficult to not imagine that movies like Ready Player One played a part in inspiring the movie that A New Legacy turned into. It also has the benefit of making the sequel feel less like the original, although it still resembled another project.
It's sort of impossible to not draw the parallels between Space Jam: A New Legacy and Ready Player One, especially because both are Warner Bros. films. Many of the easter eggs and references in Ready Player One were from WB films simply because they were the easiest references to make, and that means that we're getting a lot of identical references in the two movies, including what appears to be a significant role for The Iron Giant in both films.
And there will likely be more. Certainly Space Jam: A New Legacy isn't giving up all its cards in the trailer, and so we can likely expect the new film to look even more like Ready Player One before it's all over.
