Steven Spielberg Says Star Wars Characters Will Appear in Ready Player One After All

The trailers for Steven Spielberg‘s Ready Player One adaptation are a veritable smorgasbord of pop culture characters, vehicles and locales from popular comic books movies and video games, everything from Marvel’s Deadpool and DC’s Harley Quinn, to Street Fighter‘s Chun-Li and Overwatch‘s Tracer, to Akira‘s future-bike and Doc Brown’s time-traveling DeLorean. Noticeably absent has been any characters or vehicles from Star Wars, arguably one of the largest pop culture touchstones of the past four decades.

Initially, Spielberg said that, despite his longstanding relationship with Lucasfilm — he is best friends with George Lucas and even added R2-D2 and C-3PO hieroglyphics to Raiders of the Lost Ark — new owners Disney refused to play nice and allow any Star Wars characters appear in the movie. Now, however, he has changed (clarified?) his story and said that Disney did allow characters from the original trilogy to appear in Ready Player One, just not any of the new characters from the current trilogy.

EXCLUSIVE: Contrary to reports spreading now, Disney did let Steven Spielberg use #StarWars in #ReadyPlayerOne. Here, Spielberg explains to me how they snagged IP rights from all the studios and what STAR WARS Easter Eggs to look for in the new film, in theaters 3/29 pic.twitter.com/LslVQP1iCv

— ErikDavis (@ErikDavis) March 16, 2018

Ready Player One was directed by Steven Spielberg, from a script by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline. It is based on Cline’s bestselling novel of the same name. The cast includes Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Simon Pegg, Mark Rylance and T.J. Miller.

Ready Player One opens in theaters on March 30th.