A Minecraft Movie Brings The Billion-Dollar Franchise To The Big Screen And It’s A Nightmare
In the wake of Borderlands’ monumental flop, A Minecraft Movie looks like it’s set to be the next video game movie disaster. The first trailer for the adaptation was released and has fans of the hugely popular video game discussing how cheap and generic it looks. It’s one of the worst-looking trailers I’ve ever seen, and it left a bad impression it’ll be hard to overcome.
A Minecraft Movie will adapt the best-selling video game, which has sold 300 million copies and spawned numerous spin-offs. The video game features a minimalistic story, mostly focusing on open-world survival and the ability to construct just about anything. While the game features many iconic monsters, animals, and items, it doesn’t have characters or a plot to work with.
Most of the criticism for A Minecraft Movie’s trailer comes from its visuals…
With its non-narrative open world, A Minecraft Movie could have developed any plot, and it seems they opted for a blatant Jumanji rip-off. The trailer features Jason Mamoa, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, and Sebastian Eugene Hanson arriving in the game’s world and looking confused before a more experienced Jack Black appears, showing the wonders of the world. It showed off some genetically whacky humor, like a llama giving a literal jaw drop, and some of the game’s iconic creatures, like a Creeper and Piglins, but not much else.
Most of the criticism for A Minecraft Movie’s trailer comes from its visuals, both in the CGI and costuming. Jason Momoa’s character is wearing a painfully bad wig that I can only hope is meant to be an in-universe bad wig. More troubling is the terrible blending of the real actors and the CGI world, which looks incredibly cheap and lifeless around the characters.
A Minecraft Movie will adapt the best-selling video game, which has sold 300 million copies and spawned numerous spin-offs.
Watching the trailer, I can’t help but wonder why A Minecraft Movie wasn’t simply made into an animated feature. Trying to put a handful of real actors into an entirely CGI world is always difficult to pull off, and the game’s unnatural, blocky visual style is particularly jarring to see real people interacting with. An animated version could have captured the game’s style more organically.
It is worth noting that the trailer’s CGI could still be improved before the movie comes out. The initial trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog was similarly panned for its visual effects, prompting the character to be reworked. But A Minecraft Movie has a much larger problem than a single character looking bad; nearly everything in the trailer is tacky CGI that brings to mind 2000s green screen technology.
…A Minecraft Movie is releasing such a bad trailer soon after Borderlands, which creates the impression that it’s going to be another failed video game adaptation.
The tone of the movie also feels off, as someone who’s played the game fairly extensively. A Minecraft Movie seems to be going for a family comedy vibe, along the lines of Angry Birds, which is at odds with the straightforward survival-adventure vibe of the game. While the creative element of the game is mentioned in the trailer it feels like an afterthought rather than the story’s focus.
Many films have recovered from terrible first trailers, but A Minecraft Movie is releasing such a bad trailer soon after Borderlands, which creates the impression that it’s going to be another failed video game adaptation. The game’s popularity and young audience may shield it from being a total flop, but the trailer isn’t going to bring in many viewers outside of that core demographic. With a release date of April 4th, 2025, the marketing team at least still has time for damage control.
