The new Minecraft movie ignores what makes the video game so special.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Warner Bros.
April 11, 2025, 1:34 PM ET
The first time I booted up the video game Minecraft, in 2011, it was still in its beta-testing infancy—just a hint of the multimedia, kid-friendly powerhouse it’d one day become. I tooled around with total ineptitude in the pixelated forest environment that my avatar had been dumped into, until the sun set and a zombie ate me. After a little Googling and some trial and error, I eventually evolved enough of a skill set to do what I really wanted in the game: build little houses fitted with a bed and an oven on hilltops, tend to a modest farm, occasionally poke my head into the caves below in search of treasure.
In short, what I liked about Minecraft was the solitude. I never got good enough to build portals to other dimensions, fight demons, or construct the kinds of complex structures that many of the millions of dedicated players do. I wasn’t interested in participating in these things anyway; the ability to do whatever you want, be it staggeringly ambitious or gently low-key, is what helped Minecraft become the best-selling video game of all time. So it’s perhaps no surprise that A Minecraft Movie, the instant megahit that just broke the opening-weekend box-office record for video-game adaptations, left me cold. Starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa, the movie is jam-packed with references to the game and has been inciting mayhem for middle schoolers around the nation. (Theatergoers have taken to shouting back lines at the screen, arriving in costume, and filming TikToks while in the audience.) But unlike the Minecraft game—or at least my time with it—the feature film is not exactly tranquil.
A Minecraft Movie has been in development for more than 10 years, with directors including Shawn Levy, Rob McElhenney, and Peter Sollett attached. Its release title, which specifies that it is merely “a” Minecraft movie, reads like a threat that there are many more to come. The name also seems like an acknowledgment that Minecraft is too mutable an experience to really have a definitive cinematic version. The game is a near-infinite sandbox rendered in pixelated cubes, and your character (the default avatar is a blue-shirted man named Steve) begins their adventure armed only with their boxy hands. The most obvious move is to start crafting, which involves combining items to create something new: Fell a tree, and you can use the wood to construct a pickax; mine some stone, and you can upgrade your new tool. Soon enough, you’re plucking coal from mountains to make fire, smelting gold to make armor, and doing battle with dragons—if you so wish. Or, like me, you can choose to mostly add extensions to a humble cottage.
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The filmmaker Jared Hess, best known for Napoleon Dynamite, ultimately took on the directing job; the finished film has six credited writers, though nearly two dozen more contributed as Hollywood tried to figure out how to assemble a linear tale out of a virtual construction kit. The end result’s approach to translating Minecraft is not dissimilar to other live-action adaptations of video games, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and The Super Mario Bros. Movie; it establishes the game’s world as a dimension distinct from our own, one that heroes can cross over to for magical quests. Steve (played by Jack Black) is a bearded building enthusiast who first discovers the fantastical “Overworld,” where he can craft homes and weapons at whim. When Steve gets tangled up with the monstrous villains inhabiting Minecraft’s darkest corners, a group of treasure-hungry misfits ventures to the realm for a rescue mission.
Among them is Garrett (Jason Momoa), who could have sprung right from Napoleon Dynamite’s basement; he’s a nostalgic arcade-game champion who wears a fringed pink jacket. There’s also Danielle Brooks as a real-estate agent named Dawn, Sebastian Hansen as a creative teenager who doesn’t fit in at school, and Emma Myers as his sensible older sister. But they’re all backdrops for the computerized anarchy around them. There are hooded pig monsters, giant squid balloons, and a poultry-riding zombie child who has prompted an especially strong reaction among fannish theatergoers. Although Momoa does his best to inject some brash personality, it collides with Black’s more authentic brand of chaos; if either of them is on-screen at any time, rest assured that most of the dialogue is getting yelled.
The visuals are similarly obnoxious. Capturing the charming, low-budget beauty of Minecraft’s cuboid aesthetic would be difficult to do in live action, yet the filmmaking team makes a glossy effort. I appreciated Hess’s insistence on loading the screen with the bright primary colors I associate with the game. Nevertheless, the director makes no attempt to capture the loneliness or quietude of the Minecraft experience. The process of crafting is deployed here mostly to make fancy gadgets with which to battle the Overworld’s army of evil talking pigs. The battles are chockablock with clashing swords and explosions; more whimsical stuff, such as a house made of sheep wool and another constructed entirely of mushrooms, is relegated to background-joke status. The film’s anarchy might reflect a lot of younger players’ first experience with Minecraft, where destruction can be just as fun as creation. Missing on the big screen, meanwhile, is the odd, remote atmosphere that drew me in. In the game, nobody ever speaks; in A Minecraft Movie, there’s no real chance for silence.
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Since the official version of Minecraft launched, the makers have released many gameplay expansions and loaded storytelling prompts into the programming. I never found these additions, or the more action-oriented features that came with them, particularly compelling. The attempts to introduce structure are also optional, which suggests that the game’s looseness remains its greatest asset. But Hess and company tapped these newer elements of the game to build out their take on Minecraft. That’s fine; A Minecraft Movie is the first genuine smash hit of the floundering 2025 movie season, and I exult in anything that’s bringing young people to cineplexes, even if the film occasionally made me want to pop an Advil.
My most enduring memory of Minecraft, however, is experiencing “night” for the first time while playing: As the sun set and the game’s memorable cast of monsters began to emerge from the shadows, I huddled in a makeshift cave with a torch. I listened to pitter-pattering rain and the groans of shuffling zombies, contemplating the fact that I was the only person on a vast planet. It’s not the stuff of blockbusters, maybe, but it’s true magic.
