Why The Youth Is Rioting During "A Minecraft Movie"
The messy protest rooted in irony and IP angst is a middle finger to studio slop
Warner Bros. released A Minecraft Movie on April 4th 2025. The film is 100 minutes long & currently holds a 6/10 rating on IMDb, 48% on the Tomatometer & a 88% on the Popcornmeter. The film features Jack Black & Jason Momoa and broke the record for a global box office opening weekend for a video game adaptation by hauling in $301 million ($163 million domestically).
It’s a childish, bad-CGI, kids movie. It’s also a perfect homage to the expansive & imaginative game of Minecraft. I won’t pick on the graphics used in A Minecraft Movie as the standard Minecraft graphics are famously underdeveloped1. I avoided getting sucked into the Minecraft vortex, but am well aware of how beloved the game is. The Minecraft world is filled with deep lore, world famous streamers, insane feats of engineering all wrapped up in a pixelated, rudimentary & overall simple game. It’s arguably the most irony-filled video game world with players who unironically love it.
Warner Bros. deciding to make a Minecraft movie is an irony hurricane. You have a strong contingent of gamers, memers, trolls & a lot of people on Discord. The 60 year old movie exec looked at the popularity of the game, got casting recommendations & put his feet up thinking it would be a no-brainer. Well, the kids are protesting your bad movie by loving it. In the funniest possible turn of events, Minecraft fans & general teenage disruptors are causing chaos in theaters during this film.
I genuinely feel bad for the 8 year old super fans that had real love for the franchise & don’t understand why a bunch of 15 year olds are launching popcorn in the air & LOUDLY cheering. Those kids who have pure excitement & the parents who are sacrificing 2 hours to give that kid a good day are the real victims of this madness. Everyone else is currently reaping what they’ve sewn.
The movie studios are currently getting Morbius’d again. Decision makers in the movie business were not prepared for a revolt against their slop. They invited a bunch of clowns into their place of work & are wondering why it’s a circus now. If you’re going to put out a movie that looks bad, while featuring well-known actors hamming it up, you can’t combine that with a beloved IP. Write something new & risk bombing with grace. What you do when you make a Minecraft movie is you invite the mega fans in to your building. Minecraft fans aren’t an angry bunch, but you took their thing & made it your thing. So their response isn’t to enjoy your slop, but rather to mock it right in your face.
The kids aren’t calling for boycotts anymore. They aren’t passing around a petition to change the graphics. This is not a campaign to re-design Sonic The Hedgehog2. The kids want to act like jackasses in a theater to protest your hubris. They want to mock your attempt at a big money grab and ham-fisted game references.
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You’re Chris Paul throwing the easiest alley-oop to DeAndre Jordan here. NOBODY should be getting arrested at the movies. Let alone, getting arrested at A Minecraft Movie. A film so bad, that it has ignited a dormant teenage angst gene in the nation. The kids are standing up for themselves & a property they love/loved. Write a new movie, find a new story, stop taking the easy way out.
You used to take risks in Hollywood & some directors still do (Bong Joon Ho, Ari Aster, Denis Villeneueve). A Minecraft Movie is no risk. It’s an IP cash grab. The grave mistake is being unaware that gamers are sick of being taken advantage of with cash grabs. The micro-transaction industry, paying for extra downloadable content & the soaring price of games in general has pushed them to the brink. Now you take their most prized childhood video game, add Jack Black and Jason Momoa & think they’ll just obediently go to the trough? Comical.
The “Marvel pop” has also directly contributed to this phenomenon. All those videos of grown men hooting when portals opened in Avengers Endgame have aged like milk. They’re embarrassing even. “Oh my god it’s Captain America!!!” reactions paved the way for all forced pops to be mocked in the future. Maybe if Marvel & comic book movies didn’t become tragically embarrassing, this wouldn’t happen. Slop is as slop does, so when you let your product worsen, so will the behavior of your fans.
These are professional trolls. They’re sick twisted people who are looking for a reason to go viral irl. Nothing to lose with everything to gain. Your $150 million budget means John Squat, aka Jack Shit3 to these people. Stop punishing your movie theater employees and put out some films that will keep people in their seats.
I’m aware they have a new engines with realistic mode
a trilogy that went a bit under the radar, but people ended up loving
shoutout to Jake and Amir