In Feb. 2014, Markus Persson, AKA Notch, the creator of Minecraft, revealed on Twitter that a Minecraft movie was in production by Warner Brothers. For the past decade, the public has been kept in the dark on the movie’s development. Then, in Sept. 2024 the company released their first trailer and after I viewed it, I found that it looked really… terrible.
Firstly, a lot of innocent people found out from the trailer that the movie would be live action with ultra realistic CGI and highly detailed practical sets and props, which, if you have played Minecraft, isn’t how the game looks at all. Minecraft is a simple textured game for a reason, graphics aren’t high priority, but instead, your creativity is. So, making the movie live action is already a horrible miscalculation on Warner Brothers part.
What’s actually in the Minecraft trailer?, is a question many are probably asking. Well, we see a lot of regular human characters in this very obviously green screened Minecraft world. The film is going to star Jason Mamoa, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, Sebastian Eugene Henry and of course, Jack Black, who is going to play the titular character of Steve (the default character skin you get when first logging into the game). We also see a lot of CGI Minecraft animals, which is insanely uncanny because they’re supposed to look like realistic animals but with blocky characteristics.
The trailer failed at showing off the beauty of Minecraft and fans were rightfully upset.
There are other small aspects of the trailer that I and most other fans nitpicked to death. Some of these aspects: piglins not turning zombified when entering the overworld, trees having multiple branches even though in game they don’t have any, weird and unnatural Minecraft Block and item proportions, and the fact that drums exist in the movie even though drums aren’t even in the game (as of 2024).
Now with all of this being said, there are a few ways I think the Minecraft movie could be improved. The biggest thing we can do is make it known to Warner Brothers that it looks terrible and misrepresents the game.
A recent example of similar video game movie backlash is with the Sonic movie. The first trailer for the Sonic the Hedgehog movie was awful for one simple reason, Sonic himself looked terrible and uncanny. After fans online gave immediate backlash, Paramount postponed the movie another year and reworked the Sonic design to be more cute and game accurate. This helped the Sonic movie franchise massively because now it has 2 sequels and multiple spinoff projects, but without that redesign I have trouble imagining a world where that franchise went anywhere.
Now the question is if I believe Warner Brothers will do the same as Paramount. Unfortunately, Warner Brother seems pretty set on releasing it by its original April 5th release date, so a redesign of every CGI Asset is probably not going to happen.
Let’s say you were the head of Warner Brothers in 2014 when this movie was greenlit, what easy decision do you think you would first make? That’s right, you would most likely approve for the movie to be animated! This way the movie could be more faithful to the game.
When the movie was originally going to be directed by people such as Shawn Levy (who directed movies like “Free Guy” and “Deadpool and Wolverine”), the original plan was to animate the movie. After the project switched over to director, Jared Hess, it was turned into a live action product.
On Sept. 28, 2024, on the Minecraft Update Livestream, Director, Jared Hess, talked about why they went with live action.
“There is a lot of Fan Content out there that is wonderfully animated and we wanted to do something different,” said Hess. Well the movie is definitely gonna be different, but probably not in a good way.
This is an unfortunate turn of events because whenever Minecraft releases a new game update they make wonderfully animated trailers that perfectly encapsulate the minecraft style. On Sept. 28, 2024, on the Minecraft Update Livestream, Director, Jared Hess, talked about why they went with live action.
“There is a lot of Fan Content out there that is wonderfully animated and we wanted to do something different,” said Hess. Well the movie is definitely gonna be different, but probably not in a good way.
The work that has gone into the practical sets and props is luckily phenomenal and it’s obvious a lot of hard work has gone into the movie. But I don’t think the sets and props looking good are going to save the horrible “SNL Style” Writing and Dialogue. I for one am not sure that this movie will be good at all.
