A Minecraft Movie just crossed $900 million at the global box office, with kids and adults packing theaters in ways no one predicted. But is this actually a good film that deserves its success, or are we watching a masterclass in brand loyalty masquerading as moviemaking? Is there a difference anymore?
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Add your commentMy son turns 9 next week and he asked if we could see Minecraft Movie again for his birthday instead of having a party. We're doing it. Some kids just know what they want and honestly I respect it.
The chicken jockey scene is the best scene in any movie this year and I will die on this hill
the discourse around this film is so exhausting. it's a minecraft movie. for kids. it made kids happy. some adults also liked it. this is fine. not everything is a referendum on the state of cinema
took my 8 year old and honestly? i cried at the end. not because it was deep cinema but because watching her face the whole time reminded me of being a kid and just LOVING something completely with no irony. sometimes that's enough.
I took my 7-year-old and my 11-year-old. The 7-year-old screamed with delight for basically two hours straight. The 11-year-old told me afterward it was 'the best day of his life.' I genuinely teared up in the parking lot. You can argue about cinema all you want. I'll take that day.
the theater cheering videos online are actually kind of making me emotional? like cinema as a communal event has been dying since covid and here are hundreds of kids completely losing their minds together over a movie. that's not nothing.
I work in a school library. The number of kids checking out the novelization, the art books, starting Minecraft worlds this week because of this movie is genuinely staggering. I don't know if the film is 'good' but it is absolutely making kids excited about creative things and I'll take that every single time.
honestly the most impressive thing about this movie's success is that it came out in a year when everyone keeps saying theatrical cinema is dying. maybe the problem was never theaters. maybe the problem was movies that didn't give people a reason to leave their couch.
My nephew is 11 and he has played Minecraft almost every single day for four years. Watching this movie with him felt like watching someone open a gift they'd been waiting their whole childhood for. You can't put a critical score on that.
Not everything needs lasting value. Some things are allowed to just be a great time on a Saturday afternoon with your family.
ok but Jason Momoa being this funny should have been obvious years ago and Hollywood just kept putting him in serious roles. this movie freed him
The Jack Black casting is so obviously perfect that it almost feels like cheating. He IS the Minecraft energy. Chaotic, loud, weirdly sincere. If anyone else had done that role this conversation would be very different.
here's my hot take that nobody wants to hear: the kids defending this movie will grow up and watch it again at 25 and cringe and that's fine and normal and doesn't mean it wasn't exactly what it needed to be right now at this moment for them. nostalgia and quality are different things and BOTH are valid
The critical consensus is around 62% on Rotten Tomatoes but audience scores are in the high 80s. That gap tells you everything. Critics are reviewing the movie they wished it was. Audiences are reviewing the movie it actually is.
The people screaming about the death of cinema over a Minecraft movie are the same people who will be at the theater opening weekend for whatever Denis Villeneuve does next. Both things can exist. The cinematic universe is large enough to contain multitudes.
The real proof it worked is that I haven't heard a single child say the movie was bad. Not one. Adults keep having this argument while the actual target audience unanimously loves it. Maybe consider who the film was actually made for before you write your 900-word Medium post about the death of cinema.
The theater experience matters here too. People are watching this movie and CHEERING and SCREAMING at the screen like it's a sporting event. When's the last time a movie made an audience feel that alive? That communal energy is worth something.
I went in expecting to hate it. I'm 34, no kids, barely touched the game. Left the theater having genuinely laughed out loud four or five times. Jared Hess directed Napoleon Dynamite and that energy is absolutely all over this film.
I work at a cinema and I've never seen anything like the reaction in the lobby after screenings. Kids literally running around pretending to mine blocks, parents looking genuinely surprised they enjoyed it. Whatever it's doing it's working.
What I find genuinely interesting from a film studies perspective is how the visual style creates an unusual problem for cinematography. How do you create tension, beauty, or emotional depth when everything is a cube? The fact that they managed any of those things at all is more technically impressive than people are giving credit for.
I've been a film critic for 11 years and I gave it 3 stars. Not great art but solidly entertaining, genuinely funny in places, and clearly made with love for the source material. The Internet determined in advance it would either be a masterpiece or a disaster and couldn't accept 'pretty good kids movie'
I think about this with kids movies a lot. Ratatouille is 'objectively' a masterpiece. But the Minions movies have made more money and generated more joy in more children. Which one mattered more in the world? I genuinely don't know.
What changed is studios stopped being embarrassed by the source material. They used to hire directors who'd never touched a controller and had contempt for gaming culture. Now they're hiring people who actually GET it.
Genuinely curious what the people saying 'just an IP cashgrab' think a NON-cashgrab Minecraft movie would look like. Dark? Prestige? Existential dread about the endless void? The game is fundamentally joyful and chaotic and the movie seems to match that. What's the alternative you're imagining?
The alternative is you don't make the movie at all and you let the game be the game. Some things are better as what they are. Not everything needs a cinematic adaptation. We learned nothing from the Battleship movie apparently.
Battleship was bad because it was bad. The Minecraft movie seems to have genuinely worked for its audience. You can't compare those just because both are adaptations of non-narrative source material. The execution matters.
900 million dollars. NINE HUNDRED MILLION. For a movie based on a game where the whole point is there's no story. We have truly given up as a civilization.
The movie works because Minecraft itself works because both are fundamentally about the joy of building something out of nothing. That's a genuinely universal human theme. Critics who dismiss it as shallow IP content are missing what makes the game meaningful to 200 million people.
The Ratatouille comparison actually keeps me up at night philosophically. We have all these critical frameworks that were built by adults for adults and we keep applying them to things designed to create joy in children and then acting surprised when the numbers don't compute. Maybe the frameworks are wrong not the movies.
they are completely different things for completely different audiences?? TLOU isn't better just because it's darker and more prestige. a movie that makes children genuinely happy is doing something real
Jason Momoa has been clearly funny in interviews for literally a decade and directors kept ignoring it. Same thing happened to Dwayne Johnson for a while. Sometimes actors have to find the weird project that unlocks them.
Can we talk about how this vindicates everyone who said video game adaptations could work? After decades of disasters we're suddenly in a golden age. The Last of Us. The Super Mario Bros Movie. Now this. Something changed and I want to know what.
three stars is actually the correct score and 'pretty good kids movie' is a completely legitimate category that deserves more respect
My genuine hot take: the visual style of actually rendering the Minecraft aesthetic in live action while keeping the blocky textures and logic was a brave choice that absolutely should not have worked and somehow completely did. Whoever fought for that in the production deserves a raise.
Momoa has been funny in interviews for literally a decade. The issue was casting directors not being able to see past his physical presence. This movie didn't discover something new, it just finally used what was already there.
my nephew who has never touched a video game in his life walked out wanting to play minecraft. so to whoever asked about growing the playerbase: yes. yes it does that.
They could have easily just made it look like a normal fantasy world with some pickaxes and called it a day. Committing fully to the Minecraft visual grammar was the difference between this being a hit and being forgettable.
The Jared Hess connection is so underrated in this conversation. His whole career is about finding the humor in sincere weirdness without making fun of the characters. That's exactly what this needed.
The communal theater experience point is the one that actually gets me. I saw this on opening weekend and the energy in that room was something I haven't felt since maybe the first Avengers. Whatever this movie is, it did something to an audience that very few movies this decade have managed. That has to count for something even to the skeptics.
hard agree. minecraft isn't popular because of marketing. it's popular because it taps into something real about human creativity and the satisfaction of making things. a movie that captures even 30% of that is going to connect
this whole thread is exactly why film Twitter is insufferable lol. folks out here writing dissertations about a movie where a guy punches a blocky skeleton
Comparing this to The Last of Us in the same sentence is a crime that should be prosecuted
Counterpoint: everything IS a referendum on the state of cinema when we're talking about what gets greenlit next. If this makes a billion dollars, studios will spend the next decade trying to replicate it. That matters to everyone who cares about film.
people calling this 'no story' clearly haven't played the game with kids. the whole point of minecraft is YOU make the story. the movie actually captures that spirit pretty well honestly
who is doing critical engagement for though? the 42 year old film studies grad or the actual target audience? maybe the target audience getting something that makes them genuinely happy IS the successful evaluation
Microsoft paid $2.5 billion for Mojang in 2014. This movie is basically a $150 million advertisement for a game that already has 200 million monthly players. You have to respect the hustle even if you hate what it represents.
studios were already doing this before this movie lol. the IP machine isn't being created by Minecraft it's been running since at least 2008
I think there's a really interesting question buried under all this discourse about what we even mean by 'genuine cinematic triumph.' Triumph for whom? By what standard? Kubrick never had a $900M opening run. Does that make 2001 less of a triumph? The metric determines the answer and we should be upfront about that.
The box office success literally proves nothing about quality. Transformers 2 made a billion dollars. The bar for 'people will pay to see it' and 'it is good' are completely separate measurements and conflating them is how we end up celebrating mediocrity.
saying it's 'just an ad' misses that every blockbuster franchise film is kind of an ad for the next film, the merch, the theme park ride. at least minecraft exists as a creative tool for actual kids rather than just corporate IP
not to be that person but the script is genuinely weak in places that have nothing to do with the IP. the second act pacing drags noticeably and some of the emotional beats feel earned only because you already care about these characters from the game. strip the brand out and that structure has real problems.
62% is generous lol. The plot makes absolutely zero sense and the chicken jockey scene is the kind of chaos that should only exist in fever dreams
The chicken jockey scene is not even top five in the movie, respectfully. The creeper reveal got a bigger reaction in my theater and it isn't close.
This. The fact that something makes money is descriptive not evaluative. I'm tired of box office performance being used as a substitute for critical engagement.
the blocky aesthetic is literally the least interesting thing about the movie to me and I say this as someone who liked it. Steve is a compelling character precisely because of how Jack Black plays the internal logic of someone who has BEEN in this world for years
Counterpoint to everyone praising the visual commitment: the block aesthetic was charming for about 20 minutes and then my eyes genuinely hurt. There's a reason most successful video game adaptations don't try to literally recreate the game's look. Stylistic faithfulness isn't automatically a virtue.
hard disagree, the blocky visuals are literally the whole point. if you don't like how minecraft looks you don't understand minecraft. that's like complaining a LEGO movie has too many rectangles
The real question nobody's asking: is this movie going to introduce an entirely new generation to Minecraft who've somehow never played it? Because the marketing was everywhere and the game is already 15 years old. What does this do to the playerbase?
I feel like everyone arguing about whether this is 'art' is missing the actual stakes. If this movie teaches a generation of kids that movies are just content delivery for games they already play, that's a real cultural shift worth worrying about. The Minecraft IP could have funded something original. It didn't.
OK but what original film funded with that budget would have gotten 200 million people into theaters this year. I'm asking genuinely. Name it. Because the original mid-budget films we all claim to want keep bombing and then we act shocked when studios go back to IP.
I mean people cheered for Avengers Endgame too and we've largely decided the MCU became soulless. Crowd reaction in the moment isn't a reliable indicator of lasting value.
IP recognition selling anything is not new and it's not Minecraft's fault. Disney has been doing it with worse movies since the 90s. At least this one seems to have actual energy in it.
My film professor would have a stroke reading this comment section. Half of you are making the intentional fallacy error, half are making the appeal to popularity fallacy, and everyone seems to have forgotten that commercial success and artistic merit have been in tension since Hollywood existed. This isn't new. Calm down.
ok professor calm yourself down lmao. some of us just want to talk about whether the movie was fun
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