It was natural that the recent boom in video game adaptations would yield a new film based on the best-known virtual universe of the modern era. Minecraft, the Microsoft-owned digital sandbox that holds the record as the bestselling video game of all time, is finally taking its place in the annals of beloved gaming franchises—like Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog—that have earned the Hollywood studio treatment, celebrity stars and special effects and all. Helmed by Napoleon Dynamite director and friend of Slate Jared Hess, A Minecraft Movie throws Jack Black, Jason Momoa, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers, and Jennifer Coolidge into the titular game’s pixelated universe, subjecting their real-life bodies to the simplistic physics, creative engineering, and bizarre supernatural life forms that make up the expansive worlds of Minecraft. (You even get Jack Black yelling out howlers like “First we mine, then we craft!”)
It took about a decade to get this flick off the ground, so the anticipation is high—especially among younger gamers addicted to the online playgrounds that gained such traction during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. (See also: Roblox, Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto VI.) Critics—including me—are finding A Minecraft Movie to be rather tiresome, but if the excitement among the kids at my preview screening was any indication, families are going to love it. Already, the film is breaking box-office records held by previous game adaptations, and if you have a child who spends a lot of time playing on the computer, chances are they’re definitely ready and excited to catch A Minecraft Movie—even if you barely know what Minecraft is.
As someone who was in high school during Minecraft’s 2011 launch, played around with it (as all my friends did), and witnessed its meteoric rise firsthand, I’m here to offer an accessible little guide to the world of Minecraft and its extension into cinema—which is already getting set up for a sequel. Intellectual property, baby!
OK, so what is Minecraft? How do you play it?
The first iterations of Minecraft were developed in the late 2000s by Markus Persson, a Swedish game developer better known by his online nickname “Notch.” Persson began coding Minecraft as the first title from his gaming company, Mojang Studios, and gained some buzz after releasing and promoting free prototypes of the game to his fellow devs, earning millions of users even prior to the completed game’s official launch.
Minecraft was inspired by well-known open-world games like Dwarf Fortress, where players could employ their digital avatars to construct fortresses and interact with a wider world of nonplayable characters, with the eventual goal of building out an entire community or world of one’s own. Persson took this concept to a much simpler premise at first: a pixelated, blocky spell of open fields where users could find objects and build tools, and then use those tools to cut trees for lumber, mine for stones, harvest wool from sheep, or kill wild animals for meat. From there, as you adjust to the game, you employ all those resources to craft your own buildings—and maybe engineer your own caves, roller coasters, irrigation systems, even castles. And, of course, you can meet your friends virtually in Minecraft’s online world to work together on projects or fend off malevolent creatures that usually come out at night.
That is but a narrow summary of everything you can do in Minecraft, which has added so many special editions and user-generation features since its first incarnations that it’s hard to keep track unless you’re a die-hard. Major artists have held festivals in its blocky world, educators have used it to host science lessons, YouTubers have ridden livestreams to megaviral fame, and there’s even a whole virtual convention. In 2014, overwhelmed by Minecraft’s massive success, Persson sold Mojang to Microsoft in a multibillion-dollar deal. He then turned to posting lots of racist and transphobic tweets, which got him uninvited from the game’s 10th anniversary party. But anyway.
Does Minecraft have an overarching campaign or story with specific goals for players?
Well, you can basically decide how you want to go about that. There are special dimensions to be discovered, antagonists to be fought, and hidden features to unlock, but so much of Minecraft’s appeal stems from the free-flowing, loose nature of the game. No one’s mandated to do anything other than what they want to do.
Then … how did this get turned into a movie that I assume has a plot?
Glad you asked. There was a lot of flexibility to be had here, and a lot of people wrote story ideas and script treatments over the years as the movie’s concept hopped around from director to director and from star to star. And there’s a very deliberate reason this is called A Minecraft Movie instead of The Minecraft Movie. The head of film production for Legendary Entertainment—one of the production companies that backed this flick, alongside Warner Bros. and Mojang—told Variety that “we’re respecting the fact that there’s no one story that drives the game,” a sentiment echoed by director Jared Hess: “We’re not the official story. We’re not canonizing anything. We’re just one of a zillion stories.”
Nevertheless, there is an actual driving plot here, sprinkled throughout with familiar graphics, Easter eggs, and various characters from Minecraft. There’s going to be a lot of game jargon to follow, so hold tight.
I’m ready.
Jack Black—an IRL Minecraft player who is now in the benevolent “doing whatever” stage of his career—portrays Steve, a mining enthusiast who, in the real world, enters a shaft where he finds the Earth Crystal and the Orb of Dominance. The former is a new item exclusive to the movie, but the latter is a powerful object from the Minecraft Dungeons spinoff that’s repurposed here as the means by which Steve enters the Overworld—the iconic first dimension in Minecraft that every new player sees upon beginning the game, a lush landscape of pixelated trees, hills, clouds, stray animals, mountains, bodies of water, and what have you. There, he tames a wild wolf with a bone (something you can do in the game) and names him Dennis.
Like any Minecraft player, Steve takes to building his own amusement park–style “Steve’s World,” an effort that’s interrupted when he enters yet another portal that takes him to the Nether, which is basically the hellfire dimension of Minecraft. The Nether is crawling with creatures known as piglins, greedy piglike creatures that attack players in the game and are depicted on screen as mining nonstop for gold. The piglins are headed up by a villainess named Malgosha, who wants to ruin the Overworld and realizes that the Orb of Dominance can take her there. Steve then sends Dennis off to hide the Orb in the real world so Malgosha can never find it.
… OK.
But there’s so much more! The audience is then transported to the small (and fictional) town of Chuglass, Idaho. There, we meet Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (co-producer Jason Momoa), a washed-up ’80s arcade champion who runs a secondhand nostalgia shop downtown and lives in the past. We also meet Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and Natalie (Emma Myers), siblings who move to Chuglass after their mom’s death and befriend a real estate agent and animal enthusiast named Dawn (Danielle Brooks). Henry is a creative fellow who sketches a lot in his notebook and eventually stumbles upon Garrett’s shop; Garrett later helps Henry out of a scrape when his engineering prowess gets him into trouble with his school’s vice principal, the recently divorced Marlene (Jennifer Coolidge).
Garrett, unbeknownst to anyone else, also happened to find the Orb and Crystal at a storage auction, and after he and Henry put the pieces together, the duo—with Natalie and Dawn close behind—are transported to the Overworld, where they explore this magical land of blockheaded animals, mostly silent subsistence Villagers, and undead spider jockeys (autonomous skeletons that ride spiders and attack at night). One green-robed, unibrowed “Nitwit” Villager (voiced by Matt Berry) accidentally takes the portal out of the Overworld and meets Marlene, who takes him out on a date. Meanwhile, Malgosha finds out that the Orb is back in the Overworld and dispatches Steve to retrieve it, which leads him to the real-world crew of Garrett, Henry, Natalie, and Dawn.
After Garrett accidentally breaks the Earth Crystal, Steve leads them to the Woodland Mansion (a creepy, hidden complex taken from the game) and teaches them about the wonders of the Overworld along the way. You can take various materials and forge them together to create cool tools like buckets and swords and guns and shields! You can take out a trusty pickaxe and both dig your shafts and attack your wild enemies, like the Vindicators! You can fend off pyrotechnic Creepers who explode when hit! You can employ giant Iron Golems as security guards! You can use hot lava from underground to power mine carts and cook your own wild-caught food! You can set up your own underground bunker with dynamite, diamonds, and the teleportation Ender Pearl!
Wow, it’s like I’m getting my own Minecraft tour!
That seems to be the point—Steve, as the characters’ guide through these dimensions, is taking along the audience as a proxy, and explains everything loudly and with key detail. The animations are also pretty solid at replicating how the game works. So fear not, befuddled parents: You will get a solid education in the world that enraptures your children for five hours a day.
Are there any other Easter eggs that I or my kids should look out for?
Oh, plenty. The movie starts with a slow-loading screen that resembles what you see when you boot up the game itself. There’s a villain near the end called an Enderman, one who will be very familiar to enthusiasts. Jared Hess himself voices a boss named “General Chungus”—likely a tribute to the gaming critic James Stephanie Sterling—who at one point uses the very-online slang term unalive. (You guessed it: That just means “kill.”) A bunch of YouTubers known for their Minecraft runs make cameo appearances. And there’s a postcredits scene where Kate McKinnon voices a generic person named Alex, an explicit reference to one of the default Minecraft avatars.
So there you have it. Your Minecraft 101 lesson is complete. Now get out there and start stacking some blocks—new adventures are always waiting.
