Streaming currently on Apple TV, HBO Max, Amazon video - Rod Bishop unpacks the success of A MINECRAFT MOVIE (Jared Hess, USA, 2025)

Jack Black as Steve, 

Reviews for A Minecraft Movie were generally poor. Kevin Maher in The Sunday Times (UK) rose to new heights of amusing degradation by calling it “a garish, headache-inducing…lumpen splodge of commercial propaganda”. 

During the film’s 2025 cinema release, boisterous audiences yelled back dialogue at the screen and constantly used their phones to send clips to Tik Tok. They also threw buckets of popcorn over one another and even tried smuggling chickens into the cinemas for the ‘chicken jockey’ joke. 

Over Christmas, a relative asked how it fared at the box office. Now in his 30s, he called the Minecraft computer game and its cinema audience “another generation” - meaning Gen Z.

I’d barely taken any notice of A Minecraft Movie, but vaguely remembered it doing quite well at the box office. So, I looked it up.

Jack Black as Steve; Jason Momoa as Garrett; Sebastian Hansen as Henry

In 2025, it was the highest grossing film in the USA, the UK, Canada, Ireland and Australia, scooping up nearly $1 billion worldwide. 

Made on a budget of $US150 million, and allowing for exhibition and distribution costs, it’s probably earned close to a $500 million profit for Warner Bros.

I also knew nothing of the Minecraft computer game, the source material for the film. It turns out to be a “sandbox” game where players are free to creatively interact, usually without any predetermined goal or narrative plot. You build your own worlds.

The game has different player modes – survival and creative (the two most popular) and hardcore and spectator. Many players can interactively participate at the same time. 

Minecraft is built on digital cube constructions, and designed to be creative with virtually endless gaming possibilities. Update patches are regularly supplied and new content is available. The game constantly evolves, empowering some players to become creators, educators and influencers. 

A cube sheep

Released in 2011, it’s become the biggest selling computer game ever - over 350 million copies and 200 million active players, and is distributed free in China. The total sales revenue is somewhere between $10 billion and $12 billion. Or at least 10 times more than the gross box office of A Minecraft Movie. 

There’s not much in the film to help understand why Jack Black is an A-list celebrity for both his acting and his band Tenacious D (even if the band nicks a heap from The Who). 

Black gives a wacky, enthusiastic performance as Steve, serving as a sort of pseudo-narrator to introduce us to a magic portal and into two of Minecraft’s ‘worlds’ - the Otherworld and the Netherworld. 

The rest of the cast of ‘roundlings’ (real humans like Steve) go through the portal, learning to ‘mine’ and ‘craft’, as they join Steve in an action-packed, adventurous war between good and bad creatures, all played by pixilated cube constructions.

Unfortunately, Jack Black also keeps breaking into song, and in one of the film’s better running jokes, his singing causes other cast members to sigh and roll their eyes. 

Another joke has the pixilated cube villager Nitwit from the Otherworld escape into the ‘real world’ where he has a romantic dinner with the school vice principal Marlene (Jennifer Coolidge). A waitress comes to collect their plates: “Are you finished?” she asks. Marlene responds: “No, I think he’s Swedish”.

Dustin Rowles took his son and his son’s friends to a screening where:

“…the audience shouted back at the screen with the kind of full-throated roar usually reserved for ‘Oh, Brad!’ or ‘DAMMIT JANET!’ at Rocky Horror midnight shows.” 

Rowles thinks the film:

…is so aggressively ridiculous, it makes American economic policy look coherent by comparison…

…. So-bad-they’re-good-movies are a dying genre, but somehow … [the box office for] A Minecraft Movie suggests it may be the biggest and most successful example of the genre since Dude, Where’s My Car? What does that mean for the state of the movie industry? Probably nothing good…I’m choosing to take it as a win. Until the studios inevitably try to intentionally make [so-bad-they’re-good-movies] and ruin them forever.”