Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (June 22, 2025)
For many years, I made the claim that movies adapted from videogames never turned into Big Stinkin' Box Office Smashes. Oh, some did fine and turned profits, but a search for videogame-connected blockbusters proved futile.
And then 2023's Super Mario Bros. Movie came along and destroyed that trend with its worldwide gross of $1.36 billion. With a total take of $954 million, 2025's A Minecraft Movie didn’t do as well, but it firmly puts a stake through the heart of my "videogame movies don't become massive hits" thesis.
As he explores a mine, frustrated doorknob salesman Steve (Jack Black) discovers a land called the Overworld where everything gets built out of cubes. He winds up imprisoned in a dark place called the Nether. but not before he sends a magical Orb of Dominance to the "real world" to keep it from evil Malgosha (Rachel House).
Teen Henry (Sebastian Hansen) finds the Orb and along with his older sister Natalie (Emma Myers), real estate agent Dawn (Danielle Brooks) and living-in-the-past videogame champion Garrett (Jason Momoa), they end up sent to the Overworld. Eventually they meet up with Steve and fight back against Malgosha.
Before I viewed the movie, I heard that fans of the Minecraft game went bonkers during theatrical screenings due to all the Easter eggs the film contained. As one who never played a minute of Minecraft, each and every one of these references eluded me.
Does this make A Minecraft Movie unwatchable to folks new to the game's universe? No, as I found the story easy to comprehend.
Though I guess the producers worried that newbies like me would find themselves lost, as Minecraft Movie opens with a huge chunk of exposition - and fairly clunky exposition at that. Steve narrates the first eight minutes to spell out the different concepts in a manner that feels much too literal and overdone.
Did the producers think they needed to spoonfeed kids in the audience and that's why the opening gives us such detailed exposition? Perhaps, but I get the impression 99 percent of the youngsters who saw the film already know all these ins and outs.
Thus the painfully clumsy opening feels aimed at the oldsters like me. While I do appreciate that the flick attempts some grounding for those of us with no awareness of the Minecraft universe, I strongly suspect that they could've achieved this goal in a less blatant manner.
Honestly, the awkwardness of this opening gave me real pause about whether I wanted to bother with the rest of the film. I already knew I wasn't in the target audience so the less-than-engaging first segment prompted me to think maybe I should inch my way toward the theater door.
Happily, Minecraft Movie improves from there. While I wouldn't call it a great film, once it gets past its massive lump of exposition, it gets better.
Though the exposition doesn't end when Malgosha imprisons Steve. Once we get to the "real world", the film still needs to introduce all the remaining characters and find a way to send them to the Overworld.
The filmmakers handle these elements better than the opening, at least. Minecraft Movie manages to give us the requisite information in a reasonably breezy manner, so these moments don't irritate like the first segment does.
Minecraft Movie also shows a quirky side that I didn't really expect, though I probably should've anticipated oddness given the presence of Jared Hess as director. Initially - and still - best known for 2004's Napoleon Dynamite, Hess made a career of the kind of oddball energy seen in that sleeper hit.
I pretty much hated Dynamite, and none of the three subsequent Hess movies I viewed worked any better. Like Dynamite, 2006's Nacho Libre, 2009's Gentlemen Broncos and 2016's Masterminds all felt like they'd work best as 10-minute shorts but blown up to feature length, they became painfully unfunny.
Given that I've literally never seen anything from Hess I liked, that would seem to doom Minecraft Movie. However, Hess manages to keep his extreme eccentricities semi-muted here.
Not that the film lacks any of his form of humor, of course. However, unlike Dynamite, Nacho and Broncos, Hess didn't work on the screenplay, so that reduced the damage he could do.
Granted, Hess didn't play a role in the Masterminds script either and that one still stunk to the high heavens. However, Masterminds cost a mere $25 million, so I suspect the producers gave Hess more freedom to put his own stamp on the proceedings.
With a $150 million budget, I must believe his corporate overlords didn't allow Hess so many liberties. Normally I would view "Oppression from the Suits" as a bad thing, but given how awful the movies Hess made when mostly left to his own devices are, I feel that these likely restrictions made this a better film.
Though again: 1) we still get a fair amount of Hess-Style Wackiness, and b) this never becomes a great flick. Minecraft Movie can turns into a moderately entertaining piece of fluff.
But hey, that sure beats the pain and misery I suffered when I watched Hess's earlier works. I'll take "moderately entertaining piece of fluff" over those atrocities any day of the week.
Hess assembles a good cast, as we also find Jennifer Coolidge and Jemaine Clement along with those I already named. Of course, some of Hess's prior flicks enjoyed talented actors as well, so their presence doesn't exist as an assurance of quality.
Still, the performers do fine in their parts, even though Black so heavily embraces The Jack Black Character that he can get a little annoying. Black has acting talent beyond The Jack Black Character and it'd be nice to see him challenge himself more often, but he probably figures that The Jack Black Character pays the bills so why change?
On the other hand, Momoa goes firmly against type as the dude stuck in his 1980s glory days. While the film allows him his heroics eventually - as it does for all the actors - it still comes as a surprise to see Momoa play a down on his luck arrogant jerk such as Garrett.
Momoa's physique plops him mainly in action flicks, but like Dwayne Johnson, I think he fares best with comedic roles. Garrett allows him to do both, though it leans on humor more than anything else.
Of the remaining cast, only Coolidge semi-misfires, though not through any real fault of her own. Granted, she does play The Jennifer Coolidge Character, so like Black, she doesn't exactly stretch her legs.
Still, Coolidge brings some humor to her scenes. The problem stems from the pointlessness of her arc.
Coolidge plays Marlene, an administrator at the high school Henry attends. This really should exist as a nothing part just there to give us some plot beats, but for reasons I don't really comprehend, the film extends Marlene's presence well beyond that.
An Overworld resident called a "Nitwit" makes his way in the "real world" and Marlene hits him with her car. This launches the pair on a bizarre and improbable romance.
Perhaps the reason we see so much Marlene is because they were able to get Coolidge and didn't want to have her only appear in three minutes of the movie. Nonetheless, the scenes between Marlene and the Nitwit feel completely unnecessary and much too stupid.
Outside of that misstep and the iffy opening exposition, A Minecraft Movie moves at a good clip and becomes surprisingly watchable. Even for someone too old for the target audience and also not a player of the game, this becomes a fairly fun ride.
Footnote: an added scene appears early in the end credits to concludes Marlene’s arc. We also get a tag after the roll concludes that appears to tease where a second movie might go.
