Google the word “Minecraft” right now. Go on, we’ll wait. You see that little green block that appears? Clicking on that gives you a very basic version of what it is like to actually play Minecraft. Do you have any idea how popular something has to be in order for Google to give it its own mini-game on its search engine??
There are essentially two types of people in this world: (1) Those who know what Minecraft is, and (2) Those who really ought to know by now what Minecraft is. Seriously, if you’ve made it to the 2025 without any awareness of what Minecraft might be, then you really need some kind of commendation, and we also need to ask what is the rent like for that rock you’ve been living under? To celebrate in the imminent arrival of A Minecraft Movie, we’re here to educate you on all things mining and crafting…
Created by one man – Markus Persson, current net worth thanks to this game: $1.2 billion – as a very basic program in 2009 before being released as a proper video game in 2011, Minecraft has since become the biggest video game of all time, selling over 300 million copies. Yes, it is bigger than Grand Theft Auto, bigger than Super Mario, bigger than Tetris!
“It’s a phenomenon” says actor Jack Black, “this game has been loved by millions and millions all over the world for years now, and I think this movie is a big deal for a lot of people, because now it’s generational. There’s kids who have grown up and are out in the world working and living and have families of their own. It’s been that long that the game has been part of our world, so it’ll be cool to finally bring that universe into cinemas.”
Part of the popularity and its obvious appeal is down to its basicness, and we mean that in the nicest way possible. Minecraft, for all intents and purposes, is fundamentally a modern variation of Lego. You enter a procedurally generated world, and what you want to do within that world next is entirely up to you.
Do you simply want to fly about and create something indefinitely, with no limits or rules, breaking down trees for wood blocks, mountains for rock blocks, and build whatever your imagination can come up with? Minecraft lets you do that. Would you prefer to gamify it up a bit, inject a bit of tension by needing to properly survive, meaning you need to acquire resources to advance through the game, and then take shelter at night because there are exploding creepers in the nearby woods? Yep, you can do that in Minecraft too.
If you stopped reading there for a moment to read and re-read those two words – Exploding. Creepers. – then let us clarify, no, your brain didn’t interpret that sentence incorrectly. During the day, you can hunt down cows and pigs and chickens, but come the nighttime, you become the hunted, with zombies, skeletons, and the aforementioned exploding creepers trying to track you down.
It is little moments like those that effectively bridges the gap between playing with Lego and playing a video game. The gameplay is all so basic (again, in a good way!) and easy to learn, while the visuals don’t feel the need to try to keep up with the ultra-realistic likes of Call Of Duty or Grand Theft Auto or any other modern contemporaries. This is also why you can play Minecraft on everything from your PlayStation 5 to your mobile phone, or even on your Fire-stick plugged into the back of your TV. This is a big reason why the game still, well over a decade since its release, has approximately 170 million people playing it each and every month.
This ongoing popularity is also why, to date, we still haven’t seen a Minecraft 2. Sure, there have been spin-off games, including a point-and-click adventure, a dungeon crawler, an augmented reality version, and even a novel adaptation from the writer of World War Z, but no actual sequel.
However, practically from the second the video game became hugely popular, Hollywood was been trying to turn it into a movie. Over the years, some absolutely huge names have been attached to the director’s chair at one time or another, including Shawn Levy (Deadpool & Wolverine, Stranger Things) and Rob McElhenney (It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia).
To be fair, it took Hollywood a long time to get video game adaptations right, and that is likely because it took them a long time to take video game adaptations seriously. Some of the earliest entries – Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, etc. – have only surface-level similarities to the games they’re adapting. This meant they managed to upset both the original fans of those games, and leave any new fans confused as to what they were watching.
Jump forward to the present day, and some of the best and most popular stuff coming out of Hollywood has been based on video games. The Last Of Us and Fallout took home trophy after trophy for their respective streaming services even as they left audiences massively entertained, while the big screen releases from the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise and Detective Pikachu proved to be monumental box office behemoths.
And now here we are, with the arrival of A Minecraft Movie on the big screen. Directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre), the movie features an all-star cast including Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, Matt Berry, Kate McKinnon, and Jermaine Clement.
It tells the story of a group misfits who are dragged into the world of Minecraft through a magical portal, and must learn to master the skills of – you guessed it – mining and crafting, in order to save the day and get back home safely. Oh, and avoid the nighttime exploding creepers along the way!
The producers tested the concept of the film version with a group of Minecraft influencers. Offers producer Cate Boyter, “It was a fun to put a lot of different ideas in front of them and get their point of view and make sure that we were making a movie that felt like it was speaking to them, and they immediately felt like the movie was speaking to them.”
Talking about his role in the film Jason Momoa recalls, “I think it’s my first movie I’ve ever done like this—a live action movie where it’s going into any world like this, big or small, but it just happened to be the biggest one in history. It was my first, and it’s amazing. Jared Hess, I love, I adore, if I can always keep working for Jared I will. I love his movies, I love the characters he’s built, and he’s just a phenomenal human being, one of the greatest human beings I’ve ever met in my life—can’t say enough good things. So, I was like, ‘I’m in!’”
Words – Rory Cashin
A Minecraft Movie will arrive in Irish cinemas on Friday 4 April 2025.