A Minecraft Movie: This is our new reality, like it or not

The future of Hollywood is endless IP, but that doesn't have to be terrible.

A Minecraft Movie
Written by Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, and Chris Galleta
Directed by Jared Hess
2025

In recent years, many commentators have complained about the lack of originality in Hollywood. All of the top movies are sequels, entries in long-running franchises and cinematic universes, remakes of something that was popular in the past, or adaptations of works that were successful in other media. While the doomsaying about the death of creativity is somewhat overblown, given that there are many excellent movies coming out for those who know where to look for them, you can usually expect that whatever is currently topping the box office is going to be pitched directly at the lowest common denominator.

To make matters more confusing for people over a certain age, much of the output of Hollywood is likely to be fairly inexplicable. If you haven’t watched 30 other movies, the latest Marvel movie is likely to make no sense at all. If you haven’t spent dozens of hours watching YouTube fan theory videos, a movie like Five Nights at Freddy’s is sure to be completely inscrutable. Fully understanding many of the most popular movies requires audiences to have a full-time job of consuming different types of media, and it’s not surprising if some people just throw up their hands and walk away.

Enter: A Minecraft Movie. Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time, so a movie adaptation was probably inevitable. However, the game is famously plotless and open-ended, serving as a sandbox in which players can explore, build, and collaborate. Trying to build a compelling dramatic conflict on top of this foundation may seem like a fool’s errand, but apparently Hollywood had to try. And they also had to do it while making sure fans were satisfied, although in this case, that mostly means having the characters use a lot of terms that game players will recognize but will completely confuse anyone who doesn’t understand what things like “elytra wings” or “ender pearls” are.

The solution to the dilemma is to have some people from the “real world” get sucked into the game and have some adventures. Although that’s not quite correct; the world of Minecraft that we see in the film is really more of an alternate dimension in which everything is made of cubic shapes and people can use the mechanics of the game to build weapons, structures, and creatures. The look of this world isn’t really the same as the game, which features low-resolution textures that are blatantly video-game-like. The movie replaces these visuals with high-resolution CGI covering every surface, keeping the blocky style but making everything bright, colorful, and well-defined. It’s fairly appealing, although some of the creatures look pretty strange when they interact with real people. The game’s villagers are especially freaky, featuring giant square heads covered with creepy-looking flesh.

As for the story, the movie spends the first 15 minutes or so bombarding the audience with references as it introduces the idea of people from the real world entering the Minecraft realm. Jack Black serves as our guide, playing Steve, who players of the game will recognize as the default player character. He is shown to be a kid who really wanted to be a miner but wasn’t allowed to do so until he grew up and rediscovered his love of mining. After digging around inside a cave with a pickaxe, he finds a cubical “orb” that, when combined with some crystal thing, opens a portal to the Minecraft world. If you’re left wondering why any of this is happening, you can just buckle in, because the movie rushes past explanations to show us all the wonders of this strange, blocky environment. Steve finds that he loves living in the weird world he has discovered, so he decides to relocate to that realm, where he learns to build crazy structures and explore, just like the players of the game do.

But there’s gotta be some conflict, so the movie introduces a villain who isn’t in the game: an evil porcine sorceress named Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House) who leads minions of “piglins” in the underworld realm known as the Nether. She imprisons Steve, but he sends his pet wolf to the real world to hide the magic orb that she’s seeking. This is a plan that doesn’t really make sense (not that anything else we’ve seen up to this point made much sense either), but it serves to kick off the movie’s real plot, in which some other characters find the orb, come to the world of Minecraft, and get involved in the battle against Malgosha.

This all works fairly well as a way to hammer a plot into place, but oddly, the movie also spends a lot of time establishing a bizarre comedic tone in the real world before sending its characters through the portal. Jason Momoa plays Garrett, the person who discovers the orb that Steve tried to hide, and he throws himself into the depiction of a washed-up loser who is still trying to live off the fame of winning a video game championship in 1989. He wears fringed jackets and wraparound sunglasses, and he acts like he’s the manliest dude ever. It’s pretty obnoxious, but it’s par for the course for this movie.

While you would think that Garrett’s video game prowess might play a role in the gamer-centric world of Minecraft, it doesn’t really, and he’s mostly there to add humor. Instead, the gamer role goes to a kid named Henry (Sebastian Hansen), who recently moved to town along with his sister Natalie (Emma Myers). Henry is shown to be a clever kid who is always drawing contraptions in a notebook, so we know that he’s going to be good at crafting stuff once he gets the chance. But first, he has to try to impress everyone at his new school by building a jetpack, which malfunctions and destroys the mascot at the town’s potato chip factory, getting him in trouble with the school’s principal (Jennifer Coolidge, who is mainly here so she can interact with a Minecraft villager who wanders into the real world).

As you can probably tell from the descriptions of the tone, the movie’s script has been punched up so many times that it has become a joke delivery system rather than an actual story. There are five credited writers, but there was probably also a small army of script doctors who tried to cram humor into every available nook and cranny. It ends up being a non-stop parade of silliness, with the “real world” being so cartoonish that it’s impossible to make the conflict in the Minecraft realm seem to have any real stakes.

All of this may sound like the movie is a tedious series of gags and references, but the jokey tone keeps things pretty light and fleet, with the characters mostly taking things in stride as they embark on adventures throughout different biomes, engage in wacky chases, and come up with crazy contraptions and structures. It certainly helps to have Jack Black enthusiastically bouncing around the screen, whether he’s excitedly explaining the workings of this world, having a wrestling match against a chicken and a zombie child, or singing about a food stand he created that uses lava to cook chicken.

Since everything keeps moving along without a chance to stop and wonder why we’re seeing any of this, it’s a generally entertaining ride. There’s stuff like wild, explosion-filled chases through canyons as the characters dodge fireballs and arrows. Black and Momoa manage to sell a goofy sequence in which they hold on to each other closely while flying with magical wings, and they even avoid resorting to gay panic jokes. There are noble sacrifices and last-minute saves, none of which are remotely surprising, but at least they aren’t completely eye-rolling. Yes, it’s all pretty dumb, but if you can put yourself in the mind of a kid who is excited to see some of the concepts they recognize from the game play out on the big screen (and if you aren’t too flummoxed by concepts that make very little sense for the uninitiated), you’ll probably enjoy yourself.

If they had to make a Minecraft movie, this is probably the best possible way of doing so, coming up with just enough of a plot to provide stakes for a conflict while also emphasizing the opportunities for creativity that the game provides its players. We could have used less of the nonsense involving the “real world,” but the filmmakers probably needed that to pad out the runtime. Fortunately, they mostly avoided the mawkish emotion that usually characterizes kids’ movies, and while there is some drama related to the characters’ motivations, the movie moves fast enough that it’s always racing on to the next thing rather than getting bogged down in tiresome stuff about believing in yourself or whatever. This is hardly great art, but it’s fun enough, with tons of references that will satisfy fans of the game and enough action and excitement to keep most anyone entertained. If most examples of IP exploitation were as enjoyable as this, well, it probably wouldn’t stop us from complaining anyway, but at least we could have a good time while doing so.