We have another “Barbie” on our hands.

After the worst March the box office has seen in decades, Warner Bros./Legendary’s “A Minecraft Movie” earned the biggest opening weekend since “Moana 2” with $157 million domestic and $301 million worldwide.

Not even the most optimistic projections had “Minecraft” surpassing “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” for the biggest opening weekend ever for a video game adaptation. No one imagined that its domestic launch would be larger than what all movies grossed in the two previous weekends combined.

But this “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle”-esque adventure film from “Napoleon Dynamite” director Jared Hess, starring Jack Black, Jason Momoa and Danielle Brooks as humans who enter the world of “Minecraft,” saw an explosion in presales in the final days leading up to its release, and has been further lifted by social media buzz that, while not always praising the film’s quality, has hailed the experience of watching “Minecraft” in a crowded theater.

In other words, “A Minecraft Movie” is the supercharged version of “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” another video game adaptation that became a huge PG-13 horror hit in 2023 with $291 million grossed worldwide against a $20 million budget, fueled primarily by teens and Gen Z adults who spent countless hours playing the source material. Those demos came out to see “Minecraft” in droves, further enticed by the enduring starpower of Jack Black, which paved the way for the movie to break the box office drought and, crucially, allow Warner Bros. Pictures heads Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy to breathe a sigh of relief amid reports that David Zaslav has been considering replacing them.

With a $150 million production budget — 75% financed by Warner Bros., 25% by Legendary — and a massive marketing campaign with third-party sponsorship to rival “Barbie,” the PG-rated “Minecraft” needed to drive much greater turnout than “Five Nights at Freddy’s” did. And that’s exactly what happened.

“The unique part of this movie is that it is working everywhere,” Warner Bros. distribution chief Jeff Goldstein told TheWrap. “It is playing in every single market, and I don’t just mean domestically. It is strong in every global market.”

Jack Black, Danielle Brooks, and Jason Momoa in “A Minecraft Movie” (Credit: Warner Bros.)

In China, for example, “Minecraft” grossed $14.5 million this weekend. While dwarfed by “Ne Zha 2” and other locally made films, that is the highest Chinese opening for any Hollywood film this year. The film has also nearly made $20 million in the U.K. and is clearing $10 million in Mexico and Germany. In like-for-like markets, “Minecraft” is 60% ahead of the international launch of “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” and depending on how well it plays out between now and Easter, could be a $1 billion candidate.

But even if it doesn’t, “A Minecraft Movie” is set to blow past the $571.8 million total of fellow Warner/Legendary co-productions “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” and the $714.6 million global total of “Dune: Part Two.” It will do so because it was able to quickly build buzz as a movie that should be regarded not as a “wait until streaming” title but as one best enjoyed in a crowded theater.

And the only way to guarantee seeing it in a crowded theater is to buy a ticket right now.

Social media buzz

What’s noteworthy about the opening weekend social media buzz for “A Minecraft Movie” compared to other hit video game films like “Super Mario Bros.” or “Sonic 3” is that reception for the film itself from hardcore fans hasn’t been glowing praise. Reflective of its B+ CinemaScore — below average for a family film — some of the most shared posts have been jokes about how bad it is.

But whether they do so with sincerity or irony, the one constant response from early moviegoers was that the experience of watching “Minecraft” with others was fantastic. Viral videos show kids, teens and gamers hooting and hollering as Jack Black makes one reference after another to the memes made by “Minecraft” fans over the past decade.

After a week in which theater owners extolled to each other at CinemaCon that the experience of seeing a movie with dozens or hundreds of strangers can’t be replicated at home, “Minecraft” actually demonstrated it by bringing out a generation that has regularly been labeled as one that is no longer interested in going to the movies, with 64% of the film’s opening weekend audience being under the age of 25 and 36% under the age of 18.

It’s a Gen Z/Gen Alpha-heavy turnout similar to “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” two films in October 2023 that appealed explicitly to what younger demographics wanted. And like “Minecraft,” those films yielded plenty of viral videos of cheers and screams in sold-out auditoriums.

In the wake of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” success, NBCUniversal chairman Donna Langley said at the UCLA Entertainment Symposium last year that she didn’t buy the idea that Gen Z is averse to going to movie theaters.

“[Gen Z] is genre agnostic. They are platform agnostic. But there has to be a social energy. There has to be something they can interact with and talk to others about,” she said.

“A Minecraft Movie” may not be from her studio, but it has proven Langley right. Much of the global appetite to see this film isn’t from whether it is actually a good movie but from the need to be part of the larger conversation surrounding it and to have that experience of watching the film with a hundred-plus other people who also know what “flint and steel” means.

Jack Black in “A Minecraft Movie” (Credit: Warner Bros./Legendary)

Jack Black: One of our last true movie stars

But it’s not enough that a “Minecraft” movie mention “chicken jockey.” It needs an actor that can deliver the game reference with the absurdity that it requires, and that’s Jack Black.

Black plays Steve, the master crafter of the fantastical Overworld in which the film’s four protagonists find themselves lost. Steve is the player avatar in “Minecraft,” but has no character of his own in the game.

That means that Black’s performance in “Minecraft” is an undiluted version of the comedic public persona he has brought out in countless Tenacious D concerts and late-night talk show appearances, and which has added to the film’s online virality. While honed and perfected, Black’s brand of comedy has gone essentially unchanged since his big break in “School of Rock” back in 2003, and whether it is in “Kung Fu Panda” or “Super Mario Bros.,” it has proven to be a consistent draw for kids across generations.

“He has this energy that people want to see, specifically in PG family films,” film critic and freelance writer Lisa Laman said on “The Outside Scoop” podcast. “He had it in ‘School of Rock’ and ‘Shark Tale’ and the ‘Jumanji’ reboot. He has shown that he is a bankable family film star no matter what the IP.”

At a time when Hollywood is lamenting the decline of the movie star, perhaps it is time to put some respect on Jack Black’s name. According to The Numbers, films that star him in a leading role have earned a combined $5.1 billion worldwide. By the time “Minecraft” leaves theaters, that will reach $6 billion.

Relief for Warner Bros.

2024 was a feast-and-famine year for Warner Bros. at the box office, as hits like “Dune: Part 2” and “Godzilla x Kong” mixed with flops like “Furiosa” and “Joker: Folie a Deux.” 2025 might still be a similar year given recent disappointments like “Mickey 17” and big-risk titles like “One Battle After Another” on the horizon, but “A Minecraft Movie” will go down as a huge win for the studio no matter what.

That, of course, is because a launch this huge cements “Minecraft” as a new addition to the studio’s franchise stable, and one should not be surprised if a sequel gets announced as early as this week. It also takes some pressure off of Warner’s biggest release, “Superman.” While that film still needs to be successful to secure DC Studios’ future, the windfall that “Minecraft” is expected to bring over the coming month means that “Superman” doesn’t have to use its Kryptonian powers to carry Warner’s entire film division on its shoulders.

“Minecraft” may also take some pressure off of Warner’s scrutinized film division chiefs Pam Abdy and Michael De Luca. Similar to “Mickey 17,” “A Minecraft Movie” was a film that entered active development in the final months of previous film chief Toby Emmerich’s tenure, with Jared Hess joining as director in April 2022.

It was then up to De Luca and Abdy to steward the production to completion alongside president of production and development Jesse Ehrman, who had wanted to make a “Minecraft” film for years since Warner Bros. first acquired the film rights from Mojang Studios in 2013. De Luca and Abdy thanked Ehrman along with the rest of Warner’s marketing and distribution team in a statement released Sunday.

“We’re absolutely overjoyed ‘A Minecraft Movie’ has been so warmly received by audiences around the world and extend our congratulations to Jared Hess and his filmmaking team…who helped make the film a must-see event for moviegoers of all ages,” the statement read. “‘A Minecraft Movie’s decade-long journey to the screen was overseen with great care by WBP’s Jesse Ehrman and his team, and we are thrilled their efforts have resulted in such a tremendous response.”

It’s also another win for Legendary, which was first brought in as a co-producer and co-financier on “Minecraft” back in 2019. Mary Parent, vice chair of worldwide production, praised Hess for capturing the sense of humor and creativity that makes the game and the community that surrounds it so appealing around the world.

“It’s called ‘A Minecraft Movie,’ not ‘The Minecraft Movie,’ because everyone creates their own story in ‘Minecraft,’” Parent said. “We wanted to tell a story that reflected the themes of creativity and community, of people who wouldn’t ordinarily cross paths coming together to find joy and meaning in the Overworld and find themselves and the keys to survival.”

It appears those people came together en masse to see this “Minecraft Movie” on the screen. And the entire film industry let out a collective, “Phew!”

The post ‘Minecraft’ Exploded to $157 Million-Plus Box Office Weekend by Becoming ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ on Steroids appeared first on TheWrap.