Clear Your Schedule: A Breathtaking Sci-Fi Spectacle Arrives On Netflix Next Month
Ready Player One jacks into Netflix next month, flinging viewers into the OASIS as Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke race through a neon-soaked escape from a crumbling near future. Its eye-popping world has only grown in cult stature—now it’s an easy stream.
Fire up your VR rigs: Steven Spielberg's big, shiny nostalgia machine 'Ready Player One' is headed to Netflix. If you missed it in theaters back in the day or just want another lap through the OASIS, you can stream it starting November 1, 2025.
When and where
Per What's on Netflix, 'Ready Player One' joins Netflix on November 1, 2025. Add it to the queue now and spare yourself the panic scroll on Halloween night.
The setup
Based on Ernest Cline's bestseller, the 2018 sci-fi adventure drops us into a rough-around-the-edges 2045 where most people would rather live inside a massive virtual playground called the OASIS. Tye Sheridan plays Wade Watts, a kid who escapes his real-world problems by hunting for a legendary Easter egg planted by the OASIS's late creator, James Halliday. The prize: Halliday's fortune and the keys to the kingdom. Naturally, the hunt turns dangerous fast, because nothing about controlling the world's biggest digital addiction comes easy.
- Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller
- Director: Steven Spielberg
- Release: March 29, 2018
- Box office: $607 million worldwide on roughly a $175 million budget
- Reputation: Built a loyal fan base over the years and remains a go-to for pop culture treasure-hunting comfort food
How it landed with critics
'Ready Player One' sits at 71 percent on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer, based on 442 reviews. Not exactly a consensus, and that tracks with how people talk about it: lots of love for the spectacle, some side-eye for all the nostalgia navel-gazing.
"Ready Player One is two and a half hours of watching kids be obsessed with the cult of a dead tech genius - like everyone who owns Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs. They're obsessed with the culture of nostalgia, too, and again, they aren't alone. There's a glimmer of insight in all of that."
"Ready Player One may be a movie about the future, but it is damningly a product of our present."
- K. Austin Collins, The Ringer
Bottom line
If you want Spielberg-scale spectacle, wall-to-wall pop culture deep cuts, and a VR scavenger hunt with actual stakes, this is an easy press of the play button once it hits Netflix on November 1.