A Minecraft Movie has broken box office records to record the highest ever first weekend total for a video game adaptation.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the film took $163m (£128m) on its first three days at the North American box office (including approximately $10m for preview screenings on Thursday), which puts it well ahead of the previous record holder The Super Mario Bros Movie, which took $146m on its opening weekend in the US and Canada in 2023.
A Minecraft Movie also made a significant impact outside North America, adding a further $151m in the 75 territories where it was released in its global rollout. In China, where Hollywood blockbusters don’t always connect with a mass audience, the film earned around $14.5m and dethroned another record-breaker, Ne Zha 2, which became the most commercially successful animated film of all time in March. In the UK, the box office was even higher, at £15.5m, making it the strongest performer outside North America.
With more than 300m sales and over 140 million players each month, Minecraft is the bestselling video game of all time, with more than 1.3tn views of Minecraft-related videos on YouTube; its developers, Mojang, were acquired in 2014 by Microsoft for $2.5bn.
A movie version had been in development since 2014 in conjunction with Hollywood studio Warner Bros, and with the involvement of production company Legendary (Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, Godzilla and Dune), the film started shooting in January 2024. Directed by Jared Hess, and starring Jason Momoa, Jack Black and Danielle Brooks, A Minecraft Movie follows a group of humans who stumble across a portal to Minecraft’s block-world.
An initial trailer release in September triggered negative reactions, not dissimilar to that which greeted the first Sonic the Hedgehog trailer in 2019, while the sheer profusion of Minecraft-related video material on YouTube, with creators including CaptainSparklez, Aphmau, and Prestonplayz, also led to suggestions that a feature film spin-off was unnecessary. One prominent YouTuber, ElVitt0ri0, told the Guardian that any Minecraft adaptation should be “an actual piece of love towards the fans by fans, not just some corpo-vomited product by a big company”.
In the event, critics’ response to the released movie have been broadly positive, with New York magazine Vulture suggesting “it feels like a small miracle that the resulting film is so funny, lively, and light on its feet”, and Entertainment Weekly saying it is “a breath of fresh air after so many family films that seem preordained by lore”. The Guardian called it “an enjoyable if hectic experience”, while the Observer’s Wendy Ide offered one of the few unambiguously negative takes, calling it “cobbled-together” and an “egregious IP cash-in”.
However, audience members have been posting videos online showcasing enthusiastic reactions, including cheering the “chicken jockey!” moment, referencing a cult Minecraft meme.
