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.
This is very wholesome but also I hope he still gets cake
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.
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.
Not everything needs lasting value. Some things are allowed to just be a great time on a Saturday afternoon with your family.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Ratatouille is also a joy. False binary.
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.
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.
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
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.
Comparing this to The Last of Us in the same sentence is a crime that should be prosecuted
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
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
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
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
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 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.
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