A Minecraft Movie has locked an early April release date for 2025, and we should all take a moment to acknowledge that there’s no stopping the inevitable. The foot has been planted and can’t turn back. The brain cavities will surge and nightmare-inducing sheep will rule the day. So it is written, so it shall be.
With that out of the way, now may be the optimal time to think about what a good Minecraft movie would even look like. Indeed, what tonal, dramatic, and cultural moving parts would need to come together to scheme up the absolute best version of a Minecraft movie? The newest trailer certainly hasn’t answered that question definitively, but some of the denizens of X are convinced otherwise.
Indeed, after that hellish fever dream of a first trailer, the second trailer for A Minecraft Movie was always going to be a considerable upgrade, and it has since proven to be so. Nevertheless, this might still be the more volatile sneak peek of the two, as it’s given the internet one of the most cursed talking points to ever see the light of day.
That’s right, folks. You just heard Jack Black — intonating with a faux-seriousness as only Jack Black could — deliver the line “as a child, I yearned for the mines” as part of his character Steve’s backstory.
Everyone seems to agree that this gives us an idea of the overall vibe of the movie, but there’s hardly a consensus on whether that vibe is any good.
Back to the main point, though; it’s becoming harder and harder to believe that the brain trust of this movie is not intentionally leaning into a deathly saturation of memes, uncanny visuals, and other such nuts, bolts, and references tailored for the terminally-online.
This trailer opens with a “take two” gag, as though it is intimately aware of the intensely venomous reactions the first trailer drew, which itself seemed to exist precisely to draw those reactions, reap the rewards of the resulting attention, and subsequently try to draw people in with morbid curiosity and irony.
On the other hand, we must ask ourselves again if it’s even possible to approach Minecraft as cinematic material without incorporating its weight in the online zeitgeist, which would arguably be key to satisfying the cultural side of the Minecraft IP. But does this online identity stitched onto Minecraft need to be represented by vague degeneracy? Are YouTuber cameos not enough?
You could even go a step further. Why not have some of the younger protagonists base their whole personality on one of these YouTubers, and then center their arc around developing a healthy relationship with themselves and their inner creativity as a result of their adventures in the Overworld, which ultimately leads them to shed their prior parasocial tendencies towards said YouTubers?
At the end of the day, the full scope of A Minecraft Movie will be unknown to us until that fateful day of April 4, 2025, and so we’ll just have to ride the wave of Jack Black’s channeled ridiculousness all the way to the ticket kiosk, which we may or may not end up interacting with anyway.