By any estimation, Minecraft is impossibly successful. The bestselling video game ever, as of last December it had 204 million monthly active players. Since it was first released in 2011, it has generated over $3bn (£2.3bn) in revenue. What’s more, its players have always been eager to demonstrate their fandom outside the boundaries of the game itself. In 2021, YouTube calculated that videos related to the game – tutorials, walk-throughs, homages, parodies – had collectively been viewed 1tn times. In short, it is a phenomenon.
Such is the strength of feeling, almost all of it positive, about Minecraft that it was only a matter of time before someone tried to turn it into a film. After all, you have a historically popular product and a highly engaged fanbase: what could possibly go wrong? Turns out, quite a lot. Last September, the first trailer for the film – titled A Minecraft Movie – was released, and the reaction was instant and violent. “Minecraft fans devastated by ‘awful’ live-action trailer” read one headline the following day. Some called it “a crime against humanity”; others “a soulless neon abomination”. In less than 24 hours, the website GamingBible had called it “a curse on my eyes” and “pure nightmare fuel”. Within three days of its release, the trailer had been downvoted more than 1m times.
If you’re familiar with Minecraft, you can probably understand why. Minecraft is a game with a highly distinctive look; everything is made of square blocks, and there’s a muted palette. The trailer, however, is insanely garish. Everything looks like it is made of Haribo and, worse, the blocks have slightly rounded edges. Worse still, there are humans in it. Heightened, ironic-looking humans. Jason Momoa is in it, in an unflattering blond wig and hot-pink leather jacket. In other words, it looks like a film made by people who don’t understand Minecraft.
“This is Jumanji but with a Minecraft skin,” was the first reaction of Argentinian YouTuber ElVitt0ri0 on seeing the teaser. “Minecraft offers an infinite number of narrative possibilities. And yet they decided to go with the ‘we go to another universe and learn about it’ storyline? What is this? Space Jam 3?”
ElVitt0ri0’s response was to create A Movie About Minecraft (That Doesn’t Exist), a version of what the film should have been. The trailer was created with the open-source animation software Blender that was used to make Flow, which won best animated feature at this year’s Oscars; it’s a fully animated trailer that retains the look of the original game and features characters recognisable to players. Underneath the video is the comment: “This is everything the Minecraft movie should have been, the game elements, the history, the community … it’s so perfect.”
And ElVitt0ri0 is not alone. Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of fan-made Minecraft trailers have sprung up online since the official teaser went live, each trying to find their own way to undo the damage it caused. Vicky Fernandes, who runs the channel Gloomy Animations, made one entitled Minecraft Movie Trailer But It’s Actually Good. Her video is explicitly a fix rather than a reimagining; a shot-for-shot remake where everything is animated in a more immediately recognisable Minecraft style. And it is good; so good that the comments beneath the video are full of relieved now-that’s-what-I-expected sentiment.
“I think the movie should have been animated, not live action,” Fernandes says over email. “Mixing CGI cube-looking characters with real humans looks very weird. The CGI characters also look oddly realistic while keeping the cube proportions, making it look creepy. Overall, the film does not have an appealing art style.”
What ElVitt0ri0 and Fernandes have in common is that they are Minecraft fans first and foremost. Fernandes first started playing the game in 2014, when she was eight years old, and began making fan videos four years later. ElVitt0ri0 started playing at age 11, and quickly got swept up in its peripheral YouTube content. “One thing fans have proved again and again is that Minecraft can function as an amazing platform to tell a story,” ElVitt0ri0 says. “Not just through animation either – you can look at whole series and movies that were made in-game.”
Both YouTubers lament that this sense of history and appreciation seems to have been lost in the official movie. But perhaps that is to be expected, since Warner Bros has been trying to get a Minecraft movie off the ground for over a decade now. In 2014, when the studio first announced a film, it hired Shawn Levy to direct it. But that fell through, so Rob McElhenney stepped in to replace him. When he too stepped away shortly afterwards, Peter Sollett – best known for 2008’s Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist – briefly took his place. It was only in 2022 that the film found all of its pieces, with Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess stepping in to direct a script from Masterminds writers Chris Bowman and Hubbel Palmer.
In truth, Hess had his work cut out for him. Minecraft is a game without a traditional narrative. A sandbox game, where players are plunged into a procedurally generated landscape and are free to do whatever they like. If they want to extract raw materials from their surroundings to craft tools, they can. If they want to start fights with hostile creatures, they can. If they want to spend four days using the game to build a giant chicken (as my 10-year-old did this week), then that’s up to them.
The film nods to this with its title – it’s A Minecraft Movie, not The Minecraft Movie, because it would be reductive to be so definitive – and, yet, Hess does appear to have taken the easy path, padding the bones of a Jumanji-style offering with blockier skin. Worse still, Hess has a distinctive visual style (he is essentially the Wes Anderson of ironic haircuts) that doesn’t intuitively mesh with the Minecraft look.
And for a certain type of fan, that look is not only gospel, but in part fan led. For instance, Element Animation, a YouTube outfit that made its name with lushly animated, absurd Minecraft spoofs were so successful that they ended up being hired by game developer Mojang to make official Minecraft videos. Minecraft is now ultimately a feedback loop between the game and the people who play it, and the movie needed to reflect that.
However, the story goes that Hess basically stumbled into making the film – when another project he was working on for Legendary fell through, they asked him to pitch for Minecraft – and perhaps this lack of familiarity shows. After all, Phil Lord and Chris Miller went out of their way to reassure people that they’d played with Lego all of their lives before making 2014’s rigorously faithful The Lego Movie. Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic went as far as saying that Super Mario Bros was their main source of entertainment as children when they were announced as directors for 2023’s Super Mario Bros Movie.
This is the level of familiarity that fans have come to expect, and things have a habit of going wrong whenever directors try to impose themselves too forcefully on a beloved property. The first live-action Mario movie fell apart when it replaced Bowser (a gigantic muscular turtle) with Dennis Hopper in a shiny blazer. Paramount was forced to spend $5m redesigning Sonic the Hedgehog after his appearance in a movie trailer, all tiny eyes and human teeth, horrified viewers. But Minecraft is still a relatively new game. People like Fernandes and ElVitt0ri0, who have been playing the game for long enough to truly understand it, are still only in their early 20s. Maybe one day they’ll make a perfectly faithful Minecraft movie that satisfies the fans, but it won’t be for years.
But, again, this is A Minecraft Movie, not The Minecraft Movie. Warner Bros may have done enough to prevent this one from completely flopping – there is wall-to-wall promotion, both in-game and in the real world, plus a second trailer that seems slightly more faithful to the source material. But hardcore devotees may still feel that it’s time to put the fans in charge of any future big-screen offerings. An Element Animation Minecraft film is exactly what my children want to see, but perhaps the reins will be passed to someone else with an innate understanding of the game. As ElVitt0ri0 says, a film based on something as beloved as Minecraft should be “an actual piece of love towards the fans by fans, not just some corpo-vomited product by a big company”.