It’s a good week to be Ernie Cline.  The author behind the gamer-centric Ready Player One sold the publishing rights to his follow-up novel, Armada, earlier this week, and now Universal Pictures is ready to pick up the feature film rights to the new book.  Plot details for Armada are under wraps, but the story reportedly “features a high-concept hook that offers the ultimate wish fulfillment to every video game fan on the planet.”  I can only assume that means we’ll see multiplayer gamers whose vocabulary is solely comprised of racist and/or homophobic slurs get publicly tarred and feathered lambasted and ridiculed for their behavior.

Variety reports that Universal has acquired the rights to Armada for seven figures, with Scott Stuber’s Bluegrass Films and Dan Farah’s Farah Film banner set to produce.  Cline made both the publishing and film deals based solely on a 20-page proposal for the new novel.  Warner Bros. is currently developing a film adaptation of last year’s Ready Player One.