A Minecraft Movie is the biggest movie in the country right now. An adaptation of the immensely popular video game, A Minecraft Movie has grossed more than half a billion dollars, largely thanks to a loyal audience of teen and preteen boys showing up at screenings. Reports of attendees bringing live chickens to the theater (a reference to a Minecraft in-joke), as well as kids throwing popcorn and shouting at the screen even led some theaters to ban shouting or standing during the film.
This wasn’t my experience when I took my 8-year-old to see the movie last week. The audience wasn’t preteen boys hyped up on a steady diet of Mountain Dew and Mr. Beast videos, but women like me: exhausted millennial moms who would rather be taking Klonopin and passing out in an anechoic chamber. Consequently, the atmosphere in the theater was a bit more somber. I later learned that was because every adult who has seen this movie found it incredibly disorienting and, frankly, terrifying.
“It was uncomfortable sitting through nearly two hours of rapid stimuli — between Jack Black screaming, weird characters bopping up and down, explosions and incessant dialogue,” Adrianne Wright, the mom I saw A Minecraft Movie with, said afterward. “I couldn’t get any of it to register in my brain — it was noise. It was the worst movie I’ve ever sat through.”
My colleague Emily Gould, who saw it at a separate screening with her 6-year-old son, agreed. “I slept through most of it. The plot was impossible to follow and none of the jokes were funny at all,” she said. “I’m amazed that Jack Black was able to feign over-the-top enthusiasm given nothing whatsoever to work with, but I guess that’s why he gets the big bucks.”
The movie centers on a man named Steve (Jack Black, playing Jack Black in every Jack Black movie ever) who gets sucked into the Minecraft universe and lives there with his wolf-dog and a number of unintelligibly squawking “villagers” (one of whom ends up in the real world and has sex with Jennifer Coolidge). A tween boy, his sister, an overly gregarious former video-game champion (Jason Momoa), and a lady who runs a mobile petting zoo (Danielle Brooks) also land in Minecraft world via the Orb of Dominance, a glowing blue cube sought after by the film’s antagonist, a hideous piglike monstrosity named Malgorsha.
The plot, however, is irrelevant. What’s more important is that Minecraft has 204 million monthly players, many of whom Warner Brothers correctly surmised will see this movie. Its script (which credits five named screenwriters, and probably a whole lot more unnamed ones) is less a screenplay than a hodgepodge of memes and in-jokes aimed at preteen and teenage boys. By now the famous example is the “chicken jockey” scene, in which Steve drops a baby zombie atop a chicken — something that can apparently happen in Minecraft — during a fight scene. There’s also the “flint and steel” line (a reference to one of the game’s building tools), as well as the appearance of a pig in a crown and robe — a nod to Technoblade, a beloved 23-year-old Minecraft YouTuber who passed away from cancer in 2022.
A Minecraft Movie is the apotheosis of a trend that has been building over the past few decades: children’s entertainment that focuses less on charm, plot, and character development, and more on IP and winking one-liners that are too gentle for Jimmy Fallon and too edgy for the Disney Junior crowd. A few critics have identified the Shrek franchise as the precursor for this trend, opening the floodgates for other animation studios “to pile celebrities into recording booths, feed them committee-polished one-liners, and put those lines in the mouths of sassy CGI animals or human-ish residents of the uncanny valley,” as Guardian columnist Scott Tobias put it.
When it comes to kids’ movies, pandering has always been the name of the game. What has changed, however, is who these movies are pandering to. While Shrek and The Boss Baby’s references to The Bachelor and Glengarry Glen Ross were clearly aimed at bored adults, A Minecraft Movie’s one-liners are intended solely at its largely prepubescent target audience — if you are not a member of that target audience, and therefore not well-versed in the lexicon, there’s no way you’ll be able to remotely understand, let alone enjoy, the movie. It’s like being on a long-distance flight and the only entertainment option being an Urdu-language podcast for people who own parrots. If you don’t own a parrot or speak Urdu, you’re not going to have a good time.
In theory, I suppose, this is not a problem. Children’s movies are supposed to be for children, and it’s ultimately irrelevant whether or not their guardians are as entertained as they are by seeing Jack Black triumphantly bellow “I … am Steve.” Still, as a parent who watches a lot of kids’ movies, I very often feel like I’m being pandered to, and I don’t particularly like it. But A Minecraft Movie was the first movie I’ve watched where I felt like it wasn’t me who was being pandered to, but my child. And I liked that even less.
Unfortunately, my son loved the movie (he said it was “funny” and that Jack Black is “funny” and “good at singing”). He has been begging me to buy Minecraft and let him play it on Nintendo Switch. So at least he’ll get more screen time.
