A Minecraft Movie Is Completely Absurd, and That’s Awesome
In the pilot episode of Apple TV+’s The Studio, Seth Rogen’s satirical series about the movie industry, his character Matt Remick has just been promoted to head a Hollywood studio and is forced to compromise his artistic integrity in order to keep his job. All he needs to do is make a cash-grab film based on a well-known IP: Kool-Aid, the artificially-flavored and -colored drink popular in the '80s. In some ways, Warner Bros getting the movie rights to Minecraft, the video game, is a little bit like that. Minecraft, a sandbox video game without any actual goals — players basically just build anything they want, kind of like Lego with pixelated blocks — doesn’t seem like it lends itself well to a live-action adaptation. In fact, a movie about Minecraft actually sounds just a little bit absurd. Guess what? It is 100% absurd and also 100% awesome.
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In The Studio, Remick attempts to find a loophole in his predicament by getting Martin Scorsese to write and direct an auteur-driven opus that’s only tangentially related to Kool-Aid, the sort of film that would get Academy Awards but also do poorly at the box office. Think The Brutalist or Anora, two remarkable films that hardly anyone saw at the cinemas. It’s amusing to imagine that at some point, maybe, Warner Bros co-studio heads Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca were scrambling to try and make a Minecraft movie filled with gravitas and artistic panache, with Christopher Nolan at the helm. That obviously didn’t happen, and instead, we get A Minecraft Movie directed by Jared Hess, the husband in the husband and wife team behind Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre. Thank God for that, too, because A Minecraft Movie embraces the sheer ridiculousness of its own existence and delivers one of the funniest, most entertaining video game movies ever.
If you’re familiar with Minecraft, its most iconic character is a man in a turquoise shirt named Steve. If you never imagined the blocky and angular Steve to be played by a short, rotund, yet surprisingly limber Jack Black, you wouldn’t be the only one. It’s possible that not a single one out of Minecraft’s over 200 million players has ever imagined Jack Black as Steve. It’s a casting so out of left field that Casting Director Rachel Tenner should probably get some recognition when the Best Casting category gets added to the Oscars in 2026. She won’t, of course, but she should. Because casting Jack Black as Steve is basically allowing Jack Black to just be Jack Black, and just like the game, there are no rules. And when you let Jack Black loose when there are no rules, well, it just rules.
A Minecraft Movie is the kind of delight you end up with when there are almost no expectations. With no actual character arc to follow and no established lore to stay bound to, A Minecraft Movie is completely free to just be absurd and frolic in its absurdity, such as when a character makes a house made completely out of pink sheep’s fur. Minecraft is a game where anything goes, and that’s exactly where Hess and a five-man screenwriting team take the movie, using a story put together by three people. A Minecraft Movie, from a quick scan of the credits, seems like one of those blockbusters churned out by the committee, the product of a brainstorming session intended to score well with test audiences and sell as many toys and other merchandise as possible. Exactly the kind of movie that Remick is loath to make. Will the Jack Black Steve action figure by Mattel be flying off the shelves now? Probably not, but I do know my wife wants a real-life Dennis, Steve’s loyal blocky wolf.
Jack Black is always a riot and just as he elevated The Super Mario Bros. Movie with his comedy and musicality, he pens a few catchy tunes for A Minecraft Movie, too. You won’t be able to help but tap your foot to "Steve’s Lava Chicken" or sing your own "Ode to Dennis" to your own beloved pets. This is about as Jack Black a movie as it can get. But wait, there’s more! Throw in Jason Momoa (who co-produces) as a washed-up former video game hotshot from the '80s, and you get the most unexpected video game movie bromance of all time. The homoplatonic energy between Black and Momoa is off the charts, and while audiences expect Jack Black to play ridiculous characters, it’s a complete surprise to see Declan Harp, a.k.a. Khal Drogo, a.k.a. Aquaman, with a dad bod in a pink leather jacket with fringed sleeves as the butt of jokes in a movie that’s basically just one joke after another.
There’s a story, sure, but it’s so dumb that it makes even the plot of the Kool-Aid movie from The Studio seem like a masterpiece. Steve yearned as a boy to dig in the mines, and when he grows up to be an adult holding a dead-end desk job, he quits and starts to dig like he’s always wanted. When he finally gets into the mines, he digs and finds an orb (that’s actually a cube) that opens a portal to the Overworld, where he discovers that he can make anything that he can imagine. Makes sense? No, it does not. Nothing makes any sense in A Minecraft Movie, not even a brother and sister (Sebastian Hansen and Emma Myers) who move to another town after the death of their mother so the sister, who’s now her brother’s legal guardian, can work at a potato chip factory as their social media manager and the brother can make actual, working jet packs using found objects at school. Not even a real estate agent (Danielle Brooks) who also works part-time as the owner of a mobile petting zoo. Nothing makes sense, and that’s okay.
Did I mention Jennifer Coolidge is also in the film? A Minecraft Movie is a hodgepodge stew of absurdity, plus Jennifer Coolidge is a school Vice-Principal who goes on to date a Minecraft villager. Absolute nonsense doesn’t get any better than this. It’s entertainment for entertainment’s sake; Warner Bros took the concept of a sandbox and built their own nonsensical world that includes several nods to fans of the game, including a reverential homage to a popular Minecraft streamer who passed away from cancer in 2022. If The Studio is intelligent and hilarious commentary that satirizes the film industry — including a breathtaking and brilliant second episode that is self-referential, meta, and multilayered — A Minecraft Movie is a dumb, leave-your-brain-at-the-door movie that can only happen when a studio embraces absurdity completely. Warner Bros has a rich tradition of embracing the absurd, from 1990’s Gremlins 2 to 2014’s The Lego Movie, so Matt Remick (or, in this case, Abdy and De Luca) has nothing to worry about. A Minecraft Movie is absurdist gold.
