The blockbuster based on the brick-building video game came top at the US box office – and, with their “chicken-jockey” chaos, its colourful screenings pointed to the future of cinema.
Oppenheimer is a cerebral drama with Cillian Murphy as the scientist who invents the atom bomb. A Minecraft Movie is a zany video game adaptation with Jack Black belting out a song about “lava chicken”. But the two films have a lot in common. The obvious thing is that they each made almost $1bn at the global box office: A Minecraft Movie is currently the highest grossing film of 2025 in the US, as well as the fourth biggest film in the world, and Oppenheimer was the third biggest film globally in 2023. But the other connection is that they both show how radically cinema-going has changed since the Covid-19 pandemic. Audiences interacted with the two films in comparable, culture-shifting ways – which is why A Minecraft Movie is the most important cinema release of the year.
Not that its success was a total surprise. In 2024, the 10th biggest film in the world was Sonic the Hedgehog 3, another video-game adaptation. In 2023, the second biggest film in the world – one place above Oppenheimer – was The Super Mario Bros Movie. Also in 2023, Five Nights at Freddy’s was so lucrative that a sequel came out earlier this month, and next year we can look forward to Mortal Kombat 2, Street Fighter and Super Mario Bros Galaxy. Meanwhile, two of the most acclaimed current television series are The Last of Us and Fallout. Now that superhero blockbusters aren’t as all-conquering as they were a few years ago, video games are Hollywood’s new favourite pieces of intellectual property.
Getty ImagesAll the same, Minecraft wasn’t the most promising candidate for big-screen treatment. It’s not that it isn’t a cultural phenomenon: it’s the best-selling video game ever made, and the brightly coloured, right-angle-heavy merchandise is everywhere. But the fact is that it’s set in a world composed entirely of pixelated blocks representing different minerals, and the player’s job is to break or “mine” these blocks in order to build things. Entrusting this curious game to Jared Hess, the director of such oddball comedies as Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, didn’t sound like the obvious way to sell more cinema tickets than the latest entries in the Mission: Impossible and Jurassic World series. Then came the reviews. A Minecraft Movie scored 48% on Rotten Tomatoes, the reviews round-up site, a typical assessment being that it was a “garish, headache-inducing… lumpen splodge of commercial propaganda”, as Kevin Maher put it in his one-star review for the Times.
The rowdiness it caused
Audiences didn’t agree. The film overperformed on its opening weekend in April, with a BBC News report noting it entertained children and adults alike. “When dads like a family film, that’s a good thing,” said Steve Buck, chief strategy officer at industry analysts EntTelligence. The unusual aspect, though, was that viewers weren’t just chuckling at Black’s antics in a blocky alternate universe called the Overworld. They were joining in. Primed by the trailers, and especially by the way Black declaimed every phrase with manic enthusiasm, the game’s fans shouted out whenever they recognised a line or a meme, they threw popcorn in the air, and they generally behaved as if they were at a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The key rabble-rousing moment, inspired by a rarely-seen character from the game, was when a green-skinned zombie child jumped on the back of a hen (that actually looked more like a duck) and Black warned, “Chicken jockey!” Minecraft lovers went wild. Some Utah cinemagoers even brought their own live chicken to a screening. And at some US showings, it’s reported that the police were called.
