In the world of Minecraft, the only limit is your imagination (and perhaps “Y = 320”). Unfortunately for Warner Bros., they got a little too imaginative.
On Sept. 4, Warner Bros. Pictures released its first trailer for the highly anticipated A Minecraft Movie (2025). At least, I hope it’s the first and not the final version. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend watching it with your sound off and eyes closed. Since its release, it has garnered over 1.7 million dislikes according to the Return Youtube Dislike Chrome extension, and the comment section has left no stone unturned in its criticism. Commenter @JordoSez wrote, “Aren’t trailers supposed to make you want to see the movie?” while @deft4184 wrote, “Back when I was a kid, I always imagined what a Minecraft movie would look like. It did not look like this.” These comments, some with over one hundred thousand likes, expressed a collective dissatisfaction with the movie’s production, from the writing to the animation. After watching the trailer, it is clear why.
The trailer begins with Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen), Natalie (Emma Myers), Dawn (Danielle Brooks), and Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), who is decked out in what can only be described as a trashy outfit, stumbling through a portal into the world of Minecraft. The actors are green screened in, meaning that while most of the movie is animated, the main characters and Steve are all real people. Not only does this mean they stick out like a sore thumb, but the animation itself is questionable at best.
After a montage of different Minecraft staples like crafting, piglins, and creepers, Steve (Jack Black) bursts onto the scene with a literally fiery appearance. The characters seem unimpressed with Steve, with Natalie rolling her eyes and saying “He is such a tool bag,” (which is obviously something we all say). The trailer ends with the title screen and piglins stampeding past a village.
Members of the Georgetown Gaming Club, an on-campus community of gamers, had their own takes on the trailer. While Luke Suko (SFS ’27), an avid Minecraft player since 2013, expressed excitement for the “campy” angle that the movie was taking, the majority were less optimistic. One member lamented that the movie “seems to completely miss the core themes and heart of the game,” verbalizing the club’s collective disappointment in a lack of effort to represent fans or consider them in the production process.
So much of Minecraft’s beauty is that it is not a complex game. At its core, it is a sandbox with simple pieces that combine with the creativity of its players to create monumental and awe-inspiring projects. The animation in A Minecraft Movie, on the other hand, is grotesque and overdone, a far cry from the original pixelated design of the game. Instead of making a silly yet endearing attempt to recreate real animals with nothing but colored boxes—part of the peaceful simplicity that makes Minecraft so endearing in the first place—the animation forcefully and painfully crams realistic-looking animals into the shape of a Minecraft mob. Dan Law (CAS ’27), a member of Georgetown Gaming’s board, critiques the style, declaring “those mobs aren’t Minecraft sheep or creepers, they’re blocky abominations trying to mimic the creatures in Minecraft without intention nor care.” Rather than remaining faithful to the source material, A Minecraft Movie attempts to retrofit nostalgic video game graphics into a modern live-action story, and the result is a greater tragedy than Jason Momoa’s character outfit.
Unfortunately, this corporate destruction of an established franchise is not an isolated incident. Over the years, dozens of video game film adaptations have come and gone, yet they rarely satisfy the core audience they were meant for. This could be attributed to the challenges of creating a unique story while staying true to the source material, but this conclusion seems far from true in this case. Had the only issue been writing a compelling story, we would not be seeing a live action mess with animation that strays so far from the whimsy of its video game origin. It feels as though production companies believe that making a movie “funny” and using a game’s intellectual property is all that’s necessary for fans to pour in money hand over fist. Sadly for you, Warner Bros., that’s not how this game works.
In the 13 years since Minecraft’s release, the game has spawned its own distinct subculture. The community has created an endless stream of content ranging from original animated songs to hardcore Let’s Play videos. Animations like the YouTube series “Monster School” by Stillcraft Animations and original music videos like “Take Back the Night” by CaptainSparklez made in the original Minecraft style have become staples in the community’s relatively young but legacy-filled media catalog. Yet, in spite of the years of content that reveal what fans really want, Warner Bros. decided to try and carve out their own path in the culture. Not only have they evidently failed to do so, they did it in a way that is blatantly disrespectful to fans.
So what then should be done? I, for one, am a strong supporter of giving the movie the “Sonic treatment,” as it has come to be known. The original trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) had a similar issue of animating an overly “realistic” Sonic (or at least as realistic as a bipedal anthropomorphic blue hedgehog can be) that many people hated for its unsettling proportions and facial features. Following rampant online criticism, Paramount Pictures delayed the movie release by three months to redesign Sonic. Not only was this a win for the fans who waited decades for their favorite character to be animated on the big screen, but this change also demonstrated that fans can have a say in how the media they love is adapted. With all due respect to the people involved in the creation of the film thus far, fans of Minecraft should continue to pressure Warner Bros. to bring members of the community into the writers’ room and production team to make the necessary changes. As @Mandalrian123 wrote, “Please send it back to the crafting table.”
