On Sept. 4, Warner Bros. Pictures debuted the first trailer for the upcoming Minecraft movie, and it looks positively dreadful.
The film, oddly titled A Minecraft Movie, has been in the works for a long time. It was first mentioned in 2014 by Markus “Notch” Persson, the original creator of Minecraft who eventually sold his indie studio (and the beloved game) to Microsoft for a whopping $2.5 billion.
The idea to create a movie based on Minecraft was — from a creative perspective — a strange one. If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the game, it allows players to flex their creative muscles in an infinite procedurally generated world, where they must find resources to survive and eventually use those same resources to build any masterpiece they can possibly think of. It’s a game that encourages players to use their imagination and create their own path to thriving in the wild.
The reality is that this movie never really had a chance of working out well. The game has no characters with personality traits and no real storyline, putting the movie adaptation at an immediate disadvantage. One might argue that the base player avatars Steve and Alex are the game’s main characters, but these are really just templates that the player can easily replace. Likewise, there’s no plot besides the endgame goal to defeat the Ender Dragon, which has no buildup or plot significance — it’s just a task to complete to roll the credits.
And yet, despite already knowing that the movie had no chance of turning out well, I was still surprised at just how awful the first trailer looked.
Let’s begin with the most obvious issue: the visuals. The naturally spawned creatures within the world, referred to by players as “mobs,” are incredibly creepy. Their proportions are similar to the blocky mobs from the original game, but the movie replaces the original art style with realistic textures, leaving mobs looking monstrous rather than endearing.
The best example is the horrifying pink sheep shown near the start of the trailer. While the game’s original blocky art style makes the sheep’s proportions cohesive with its overall look, the movie’s version — complete with realistic fur, teeth and eyes — looks like a failed lab experiment begging to be put out of its misery.
While there was a similar design choice made with the Pokémon creatures in 2019’s Detective Pikachu, that film worked a lot better for two reasons: first, the more believable proportions of the characters didn’t completely ruin their designs, and second, that movie intentionally leaned into the creepiness of its monsters, making it an intentional design decision, where the Minecraft movie feels like its designers just didn’t fully think it through.
It’s going to be difficult to sit through 90 minutes of these scary monsters, especially when I hold their original designs so close to my heart. These are iconic designs, and it feels like the movie is spitting on them. It would have been much better if the movie were animated rather than live-action and stayed true to the game’s original look, much like the many wonderful fan animations that exist on the internet. In fact, one fan completely animated the movie’s trailer, and it looks infinitely better than the live-action slop we’re getting.
It’s also incredibly unlikely that the movie will be visually revamped before its release like what happened with 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog after its first trailer garnered a similarly negative reception. While re-animating Sonic was a lot of work for the team behind the movie, that was only one character.
For the Minecraft movie to receive a visual “fix,” it would require its team to erase just about everything they’ve done across the movie’s world and basically start from scratch — after all, if they’re going to adjust the mobs, they’d have to adjust the complete environment for the sake of visual cohesion. Plus, that still wouldn’t fix the problem of having live-action characters within an animated world.
It’s simply not going to happen.
There are plenty of other problems with the trailer, such as the human characters.
Notably, Jack Black’s performance as Steve is incredibly underwhelming, especially after he triumphed in his performance as Bowser in last year’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie. It’s likely no fault of Black himself: his introductory line is fairly cringe-inducing and has subsequently been meme-d all over the internet. Plus, he doesn’t look anything like Steve from the original game; it looks like they simply tossed Black a teal t-shirt and called it a day.
The other characters aren’t much better, with similarly cringe-worthy lines (“ugh, this guy is such a tool bag”) and a feeling of being visually misplaced within the game’s world. Indeed, as many viewers have pointed out, it is glaringly obvious that the actors are just walking in front of a green screen. At no point does it really feel like they’re within the movie’s world; they always look out of place.
In terms of plot, the movie is using the incredibly basic motif of “real-world people get sucked into video game world,” not unlike 2017’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, another movie starring Jack Black. It feels like the least creative route that the film could have taken. In my opinion, it would have been much more interesting to see a story that naturally takes place solely within the world of Minecraft, although this would still have been very hard to pull off given the original game’s lack of a dedicated plot.
There are so many other questions presented by the trailer: Why is the light source coming from behind every single character even when they’re facing each other? Why did The Beatles allow their music to be used in this trailer? Why is the film titled A Minecraft Movie instead of Minecraft: Movie Edition? And, most importantly, how did the crew manage to find a way to make Jason Momoa not handsome?
Given all my critiques, you might be wondering how I would’ve made this movie if I were given full creative control over it. The answer is simple: I wouldn’t have made the movie at all.
Minecraft is a game about infinite freedom, creativity and player expression. There was never any possibility that it would translate well into a 90-minute film with dedicated characters and a structured storyline. The unfortunate reality was that the film was doomed from the start. It’s like trying to make a movie adaptation of a blank piece of paper: the original paper is a blank slate that encourages people to think creatively about what they might draw on it, but when a team creates a movie about it, they’re only sharing their interpretation of what they’d like to draw. Much like the Minecraft movie, these confines and restrictions defeat the purpose of the source material — the creativity it inspires in each person who encounters it — and it becomes frustrating for those who have grown attached to it.
The Minecraft movie looks absolutely dreadful, and it’s a shame to see the beloved game’s IP misused in this way. It’s only a matter of time before we can see the entire movie when it releases on April 4, 2025, allowing us to finally experience the full discomfort and terror that the movie has to offer.
