Ready Player One director Steven Spielberg confirms Star Wars references

He clarified earlier comments which suggested Disney had blocked him from including them

Steven Spielberg has confirmed Ready Player One will feature references to Star Wars days after suggesting Disney blocked him from doing so.

The directing maestro's new film - an adaptation of the Ernest Cline novel - is laden with references to 1980s popular culture with Fandango reporting that characters from George Lucas' original trilogy has been included in the final edit.

“We didn’t want to use the main cultural icons from any of the Disney Star Wars films because those are ongoing. That’s really part of our contemporary world right now. And even though it began in the ’80s, it is so much a part of our real life today in the 21st century. So we asked for some of the smaller items, and Disney gave us everything we asked for."

He confirmed the film will feature appearances from R2-D2 and an X-Wing.

This completely goes against Spielberg's earlier comments a recent press conference at SXSW where he told journalists: “We couldn’t get any Star Wars rights. [We tried] very hard. They wouldn’t give up the Star Wars rights.“ It suggests that the filmmaker may have tried to include characters from the most recent films starring Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Adam Driver.

Early reactions to Ready Player One have praised the film as an “astonishing” technical marvel with one journalist calling it “the geekiest movie” ever created.

The film follows a teenage gamer (Tye Sheridan) as he participates in a high-stakes pursuit to find hidden treasure in a virtual reality world called the OASIS. The film also stars Ben Mendelsohn, Olivia Cooke and Mark Rylance who plays the world's deceased creator James Halliday.

Ready Player One is released in the UK on 30 March 2018

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