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.” 

Streaming on SBS On Demand - Rod Bishop ponders the fate of THE SONG OF NAMES (François Girard, Canada/Hungary, 2020)

When films bomb at the box office and with the critics, the reasons are usually fairly obvious. The likely culprits are scripts that fail to convince; unfocused and poor direction; actors struggling with characters the audience can’t identify with; subject matter that isn’t interesting enough for a couple of hours of your time; and failed exhibition and distribution strategies.

Then there are films like Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes    (1971), or more recently Xavier Dolan’s The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (2018) and now, The Song of Names (2019), films that appear to have none of these faults but still become catastrophic box office failures.

The script for The Song of Names is solid enough and based on the well-regarded novel by Norman Lebrecht from 2003. It opens prior to the outbreak of WW2 as a British family hosts a young Jewish-Polish violin virtuoso (Dovidl) who shares a room with their son (Martin). Over the years, the boys become firm friends and, at the time Dovidl agrees to his debut concert in London with an orchestra in 1952, he has heard nothing, either during or after the war, about the fate of his Warsaw family. But on the night of the concert, Dovidl fails to turn up, (disappointing his packed, black-tie audience) and then promptly disappears for the next 35 years. Martin searches for Dovidl for over three decades and when he finally tracks him down, we learn the devastating truth behind the title The Song of Names.

Tim Roth and Clive Owen play the boys as adults; François Girard (The Red Violin) directs; there was more than $AU30 million to bring the story to the screen and Howard Shore contributes an exquisite musical score with the Australian-South Korean Ray Chen playing the violin solos. The first screenings were well received, some seeing the sumptuously mounted production as potential “Oscar bait” and the film sold to more than 30 territories.

Then everything went downhill. Fast. Total box office came in at an embarrassing $2 million and the 56 critics’ reviews aggregated on Rotten Tomatoes produced a poor 36% approval rating and it joined other films with the same modest score - Babes in Toyland; Battle: Los Angeles; Ernest Saves Christmas and Fantastic Beasts 2.

A couple of issues emerge from the negative reviews. There is one undeniably brilliant and unforgettable sequence towards the end of the film. Some wonder why the rest of the film wasn’t as undeniably brilliant.

The second issue is linked with this. Whether as a precocious 10-year-old or a virtuoso teenager or an adult, Dovidl is by far the most interesting character. But he’s not the lead and Martin consumes far more screentime. I’m not sure whether this is a good enough reason to dislike a film. After all, I’ve never heard The Third Man dumped on because the most interesting character Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is barely on screen for 10 minutes.

So why do good films bomb? Jay Leno isn’t sure, but he has a humorous take: “Remember the good old days when the only bomb you had to worry about on the plane was the Rob Schneider movie”.