Minecraft Was Not For You, Never Was For You

Hollywood is going to adapt all your games

Submitted by jmfilm

“It’s stupid. Why would they make that a film? How do you make that a film?”

If you heard kids mention the approach of a Minecraft movie, the above thoughts ran through your head. Even if you play the game yourself, you were probably shocked Hollywood would try this and wondered how they would do it. Warner Brothers optioned the rights, poured $150 million into it, and now have a hit.

A year ago, I wrote that video games were coming and laid out the financial and audience reasons for it. The angle was more from defined story games with adult audiences to tap built in audiences for a baseline of revenue. The initial success of the Minecraft movie points to something else.

This is a Zoomer movie. The advertising and marketing effort went hard on TikTok where the Zoomers are. It’s a video game movie, but it’s a Zoomer video game. It’s for them and geared to them. Minecraft was probably the first time young X or elder Millennial parents felt old when their kid played Minecraft and they stared at their child playing it for hours, wondering what the hell was the draw. Minecraft came out in Obama’s first term and was the biggest game for the following decade. Every Zoomer grew up with this as an accessible, easy game for, at least, their teen years or their entire childhood. Youtubers with tens of millions of followers, including the psychopathic 380 million follower Mr Beast, are Minecraft players. A giant ecosystem of Minecraft players that dwarfs whatever subculture you engage in exists. Warner Brothers was the legacy media entity that cashed in.

Was the film good? Not really. It is a kids’ movie. Jack Black and Jason Momoa star, but no one was going for them. They were going to see Minecraft imagined on the silver screen. Social media has videos of audiences of children, teens and young adults going nuts for all of the in-jokes and Minecraft memes on the big screen. Oh look, a reference to a legendary Minecraft Youtuber who died. You did not care, but his 18 million subscribers loved the shout out. This is validation that their Internet culture is real. It’s onscreen, therefore it exists! They stuffed so many Zoomers Minecraft memes into this that they had audiences popping like a WWE crowd.

As an adult taking a son or daughter to this, you may have rolled your eyes at seeing “Starring Jack Black” onscreen. There is a weird countdown to when a comedian or comic actor loses his funny, and no one is immune. It just happens. Black has found a way to recover by just becoming a caricature of his former act but in kids’ movies. Again, this movie is not for you. It is for kids. It is for Minecraft players. Black does every Jack Black! thing like ridiculous over the top deliveries, physical comedy and of course, metal parody singing as he once did with Tenacious D. In Jumanji, Black did gay impersonation Jack. In Super Mario Brothers, he did over the top villain Jack with musical moments. This movie is pure Jack that you remember from twenty years ago and grew tired of a decade ago. Roll your eyes, but the kids in the audience loved it. They don’t know. It’s new to them. It’s like kids loving Eddie Murphy in a fat suit twenty five years ago while adults frowned remembering what Eddie Murphy used to be.

It is not for you, and that is okay with Hollywood. They have a new crop of young adults and teens to target and they have searched for a gimmick after Avengers: Endgame. Zoomers do not read. There are no book series to adapt like Hollywood did in the 2000s. They do play video games. Those are their stories. Hollywood is going to mine them.

There is a message though that these Zoomers should pay attention to. You can laugh at the scriptwriters who put in that creative kids get bullied or picked on, which is just them hashing out their childhood. At the end, the protagonist does not want to stay in the Minecraft world but goes home. Steve tries to sell him on it. Steve joins him. No one has properly faced in the discourse why children and adults will build and build in Minecraft rather than go outdoors and try anything real. Is it owned space sanitized and over-regulated? Is it a social wasteland overrun with homeless and third worlders? Something happened so that tens of millions of Americans choose to make block forts and travel around a digital valley rather than do it in real life. Adults choose to build musical instruments and working computers in Minecraft rather than go outside. We all need to choose the real world. We all also need to make the real world an enticing space for these millions of children who do want adventure, challenges, to build and to play.