The upcoming movie based on the hit game Minecraft, A Minecraft Movie produced by Warner Brothers and directed by Jared Hess, is looking like it will turn out worse than expected. The main cast includes Jack Black as Steve, the default character in the game Minecraft, along with Jason Mamoa, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, and Sebastian Hansen. The upcoming action adventure movie has the task of translating the number one best-selling video game into a movie that has been in the works for almost 10 years now; however, the recent trailer has left fans concerned about how it will turn out.
As sophmore, Aviral Saxena, who is a Minecraft fan puts it, “The new Minecraft movie looks really bad, it seriously doesn’t have the same vibe as the game.”
While the video game Minecraft has captured the imagination of millions, many aspects of the movie have left fans wondering where the large budget and 10 years of work on this project have gone. The trailer for the movie has been shot in live action instead of being animated, leaving fans worried on how the studio will capture the unique blocky charm of Minecraft.
A Minecraft Movie’s trailer follows the journey of four people, seemingly transported into the game Minecraft with little to no knowledge about it. As the trailer opens, it cuts to a pink sheep, one of Minecraft’s most iconic characters, with extremely realistic human teeth. This visual of the sheep was extremely jarring, as many fans expected a cuter approach towards the animals, similar to the video game. This CGI and lack of faithfulness to the Minecraft game is echoed throughout the rest of the trailer, showing extremely detailed CGI monsters as opposed to the much tamer, blocky creatures that many fans had expected. While some other live-action movies based on video games have succeeded in the past, movies with poorly done CGI characters have been known to either flop or require the studio to completely redesign the CGI character, highlighted by 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog.
Junior, Wilson Chen, comments on the CGI, as it “looks so bad, like why does the llama have human teeth?”
A Minecraft Movie’s landscape is another large point of scrutiny within the Minecraft fanbase. The millions of dollars spent on CGI for the landscape don’t follow the source material, causing disappointment from fans. In the first shot of the trailer, the vast world it pans out to does not match the world of Minecraft in the slightest, creating terrain that fans could never see in the game they love. Along with that, the background clashes with the actors showing up on screen, with many believing that they were just green-screened into the shot.
Overall, the trailer has garnered an estimated 1.1 million dislikes to a measly 520,000 likes, making it a nearly 2:1 ratio of dislikes to likes. Unless the movie succeeds off hate-watching and hardcore fans seeing the movie, 2025’s A Minecraft Movie will almost certainly flop in the box office.
