If you were to throw a bucket in Hollywood today, you could easily find a dozen video game adaptations in development, either as TV series or movies. They're all vying for the same thing: critical acclaim, huge box office revenue, or a sudden surge in streaming subscribers thanks to established fandoms. But it's a long shot: Will they become a "Borderlands" movie flop or a "Last of Us" hit?
Next month, Legendary Entertainment, Warner Bros. Pictures, and Microsoft are going for box office gold with a different kind of game-to-movie adaptation: "A Minecraft Movie."
Director: Jared Hess
Writers: Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener
Stars: Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa, Emma Myers
For the uninitiated, Microsoft-owned "Minecraft" is a sandbox game that immerses players in the Overworld, a whimsical dimension made up of blocky, box-like voxels. There's no single story or single way to play: users can craft items, build structures, battle enemies, befriend animals, and explore islands created by other players. Imagine Legos in a world with endless possibilities.
The game allows each player to control their characters and create stories on their own; that's one of the great appeals of this highly customizable type of game. Therefore, by adapting "Minecraft" to the big screen, each fan of the game will arrive at the theater with a very different vision of what to expect.
"We call it 'A Minecraft Movie' because we respect that there's no single story driving the game," says Mary Parent, president of worldwide production at Legendary.
"We're not the official story," adds director Jared Hess. "We're not canonizing anything. We're just one of countless stories."
"Minecraft" has become a classic among gamers of all ages, but much of its success is due to the game's popularity among tweens. Maintaining the PG rating for the film was an important requirement for Microsoft. And yet, "A Minecraft Movie" features the hottest stars, Jason Momoa and Danielle Brooks (along with youngsters Emma Myers and Sebastian Eugene Hansen), as a group of misfits who find themselves transported to the fantastical cube world, guided by Jack Black, a skilled craftsman named Steve.
If the game's most passionate fans aren't happy with the film adaptation, they'll certainly be quick to voice their opinions. The trio of corporate heavyweights behind the initiative acknowledges that the film is an experiment using a linear narrative around user-driven gameplay. If successful, "A Minecraft Movie" could spawn countless spin-offs. If it fails, it could be similar to "Halo," the poorly received Showtime series based on another major Microsoft gaming franchise. "Halo" was canceled last year after two big-budget seasons.
Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, says the tech giant is embracing the spirit of trial and error as Hollywood grapples with video games and vice versa. “We’re learning and growing through this process, which gives us more confidence to do more,” Spencer says. “We learned by making ‘Halo.’ We learned by making ‘Fallout.’ So all of these build on themselves. And obviously, we’ll have a couple that will fail. But what I would say to the Xbox community that enjoys this work is, ‘You’re going to see more, because we’re gaining confidence and learning from this.’”
Since its launch in 2011, “Minecraft,” developed by Swedish studio Mojang, has become the best-selling video game of all time, with more than 300 million copies sold. Microsoft acquired Mojang for $2.5 billion in 2014. Today, Microsoft says that nearly two-thirds of “Minecraft” players reside outside the US and that monthly active users (MAUs) have increased fivefold since Microsoft acquired Mojang. The game has been released on more than 15 platforms since Microsoft took control.
That was around the same time Mojang set out to bring "Minecraft" to the big screen. The film, which opens on April 4 (coincidentally, Microsoft's 50th anniversary), has been in development for more than a decade and went through three directors before Legendary, WB, and Microsoft settled on Hess, who directed "Napoleon Dynamite." The stakes are high for everyone involved because of the value of the "Minecraft" franchise to Microsoft, and because Hollywood's embrace of video games has resulted in hits like 2023's "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," as well as HBO's "The Last of Us" and the series adaptation of "Fallout" from Microsoft-owned Amazon Prime Video. If "A Minecraft Movie" flops, it could undermine the confidence that Hollywood and video game publishers have in the company.
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