Nothing makes you feel older than watching someone two generations younger than you play Minecraft – except, perhaps, watching someone two generations younger watching someone else play Minecraft on YouTube. (What are they doing? Why are they always so over-excited?) This might all seem a bit 2011: gen A have generally moved on to watching YouTubers play Fortnite, Roblox and Elden Ring with their minds instead. But there are still millions of people, most of them kids, playing every month, and there’s powerful nostalgia for this blocky virtual-Lego game among the gen Z young adults who grew up with it. A Minecraft movie was inevitable.
This film has been on the cards since 2012, originally with Ryan Reynolds’ Wrexham FC mate Rob McElhenney on to direct, and Steve Carell to star. Various botched attempts, Covid, and the pesky actors’ strike, meant that filming didn’t start (in Auckland, New Zealand) until early 2024. A Minecraft Movie, out April 2025, is directed by Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess, and stars Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Emma Myers, Jennifer Coolidge, Jermaine Clement and Matt Berry. From the trailer released this week, it’s even more bonkers than you would imagine.
Video game and franchise movies can unfurl in various ways. The characters from the game can escape into our world, like Sonic (an alien hedgehog) getting sent to Earth, or Barbie and Ken sneaking out of Barbieland. Real people can get sucked into a video game, as in Tron, and have to complete some sort of magical quest to escape. The video game characters can turn human, like Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Prince of Persia, Doom and The Last of Us. Tetris is set around the real-life race to license the game, and Grand Turismo is the story of a player making it for real as a driver.
In A Minecraft Movie, a group of humans are sucked into the Overworld, the dimension where Minecraft is real. A nonplussed Momoa is fresh back from getting his highlights and bangs done at the hairdresser, having accidentally picked up the wrong pink coat. Danielle Brooks from Orange Is the New Black is there with some “kids” (including 22-year-old Emma Myers from Wednesday). Here they meet Steve, one of the default characters from Minecraft, who comes in a light blue T-shirt and jeans and played by Jack Black, who after last year’s performance as Bowser in the Super Mario movie is surely regarded by Warner Bros as something of a success talisman. “This guy is such a toolbag,” moans Myers.
“Anything you can dream about, here you can make,” explains Black to our bewildered heroes, as cuboid pigs fly past and pink blocky sheep go “baa”. To get back home “they’ll have to master this world (and protect it from evil things such as piglins and zombies, too) while embarking on a magical quest.” Told you.
The reactions to the trailer have gone from “horrifying”, “devastating” and “expensively naff” to “painful for the parents who are going to be dragged along to see it” and “worst thing to happen in cinema in 2024”. But, like many video game spin-off movies, it isn’t aimed at adult film critics. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, who knows his cinematic onions, was so critical in his two-star review of 2023’s The Super Mario Bros Movie (as was The Observer’s Wendy Ide in her one-star review) that Guardian games editor Keza MacDonald felt moved to defend it as a decent translation of the games, even if it’s not that good a movie.
So what does a real connoisseur think? “I think it looks pants,” says 10-year-old Arlo, whom I rudely interrupt playing some post-school Roblox on the iPad. “Minecraft isn’t at its peak in popularity any more. Why are they making a film about it now? I don’t think it will do well.” (He’s got a point.) Does he like that it’s real people set in the Minecraft world?
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“No. They should have made it like The Lego Movie or Super Mario Bros. That was good because it didn’t have live action people. Steve is just not Steve.” Sorry, Minecraft. Sorry, Jack Black. The expert has spoken. We’ll see next April whether the full film can salvage things.