Like cinema owners around the world, Brandon Jones is thrilled to see fans queueing up for tickets to see A Minecraft Movie, the first breakout hit in an otherwise dismal year for the industry.
But his excitement is tinged with anxiety as he thinks about what could happen to The New Canaan Playhouse, his lovingly restored, century-old cinema in Connecticut, when the audience hears actor Jack Black shout out the words “chicken jockey”.
This phrase, as any teenager with a TikTok account can tell you, has become the cue for Minecraft fans to stand, scream, toss buckets full of popcorn, hurl soda, and — in at least once instance — hoist a live chicken into the air. Police have even been called to some American cinemas.
“We’ve had popcorn thrown, we’ve had soda thrown,” says Jones, who is a little worried about potential damage to the upholstery. “We’ve got really nice plush luxury chairs.”
Jones’s staff has started entering the cinema just before the “chicken jockey” scene, which seems to keep a lid on the mayhem. “We want people to have fun, we just don’t want them to be destructive,” he says. “Yell and cheer and throw a little bit of popcorn, just don’t ruin it for other people.”
A Minecraft Movie, released on April 4, may have left a long trail of popcorn and spilled soda in cinemas in the US and UK, but it has also lifted spirits in the film business. The movie is expected to reach $700mn in ticket sales worldwide this weekend — and has already become the second highest grossing movie based on a video game, after the Super Mario Bros Movie in 2023.
But beyond the strong box office weekend results, A Minecraft Movie is also the latest sign that Hollywood has finally cracked the formula for translating video games into successful films.
The thesis that game-crazy fans would flock to see their favourite characters on the big screen was always compelling on paper, but a succession of flops, including the first Super Mario Bros in 1993, proved otherwise. “There was a period when video game movies were just not working,” says one executive at a studio that has had success with game films. “They were bad movies, trash movies.”
Recent hits, including a trio of Sonic the Hedgehog films, Five Nights at Freddy’s and a second attempt at a movie based on Super Mario in 2023 are giving studios hope that games could provide a rich seam of untapped intellectual property to develop — just at the moment when the Marvel comic book franchises appear to have run out of steam.
The Marvel superhero films that dominated the box office in the 2010s have proven to be less reliable hitmakers in the 2020s. Starting with Iron Man in 2008, Marvel generated $30bn at the box office over the following decade, with six of its Avengers movies ranking in the list of top 20 highest-grossing films.
But after some misfires, Disney chief executive Bob Iger has pared back on the number of Marvel releases in hopes of refocusing on quality. For Iger, the tipping point appeared to be the 2023 release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — a sequel no one seemed to ask for — followed later that year by The Marvels. That film, also a sequel, gained the ignominious distinction of having the studio’s worst-ever opening weekend.
“Sequels typically worked well for us,” Iger noted at a news conference, before questioning whether that was still the case. “Do you need a third and a fourth?” he asked.
Last year the studio only released one film from the franchise, Deadpool & Wolverine, a sequel that grossed $1.3bn.
DC Studios, owned by Warner Bros, has also had a rocky few years with flops such as last year’s musical Joker: Folie à Deux. The studio has a lot riding on this summer’s Superman, which is set for a July release.
Now some believe that studios will become more aggressive about mining proven video games for ideas to develop into film franchises. “Marvel and other comic books were what we made our movies from for the last 20 years,” the executive continues. “I think have replaced comic books as the next frontier of IP to be explored.”
After rightly being criticised for poor quality, some productions based on video games are beginning to match the ambition and craftsmanship of some prestige TV and cinema, says Robert Thompson, a media professor at Syracuse University. He cites HBO’s The Last of Us, based on the video game of the same name, and Fallout on Amazon Prime.
“Those were both taken very seriously by critics,” he says. “This comes at the same time that the video game is now being taken seriously as its own independent art form with its own set of storytelling possibilities as a medium.”
For Shuji Utsumi, president and chief executive of Sega America and Europe, the video game maker, this moment has been a long time coming. He recalls being snubbed by Hollywood executives when he made an elevator pitch for a movie based on a game in the 1990s. “I was treated like we were a toy company,” he recalls. But he has no trouble arranging a pitch meeting now.
“We are talking to many Hollywood people,” Utsumi tells the FT. “They understand that games are bigger than music and bigger than motion pictures now. Games are now becoming the culture.”
A Minecraft Movie certainly seems to have touched a cultural nerve. Much like the Barbenheimer phenomenon of 2023, where online memes fed an unlikely cross-pollination of interest in both Barbie and Oppenheimer, user-generated TikTok videos have turned A Minecraft Movie into an event that fans feel they have to experience in a crowded cinema.
Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour concert film in 2023 also became something fans wanted to see on a big screen in the company of other Swifties — and resulted in the highest-grossing concert film of all time.
The key to success for Minecraft or other films based on video games, says the veteran studio executive, is “fan service” — paying attention to the details that attracted the audience in the first place and resisting the temptation to force it into the conventions of a traditional movie. “The more accurate you can make it based on the characters and the milieu of the game and the attention to detail is what the audience really rewards,” he says.
Jesse Ehrman, president of development and production at Warner Bros, which produced A Minecraft Movie, says the film is perfect for a “fan-focused, digital strategy” on TikTok, Instagram and other social media platforms.
“You have to make something and do something that the fans really embrace, and you give them the tools and you empower them,” he says. “It has to feel organic.”
The now famous “chicken jockey” TikTok video that has fuelled the chaos at A Minecraft Movie screenings was user-generated, not the product of the Warner Bros marketing department. Fans of the Minecraft video game know that spotting a “chicken jockey” — a baby zombie riding on the back of a chicken — is an extremely rare event that could warrant some kind of celebration.
“I’d be lying if I said I knew that [chicken jockey] would be a thing, but it was something that we talked about,” Ehrman says. “You can’t account for the emergent behaviour and the things that people connect with. You just want to create a movie that feels fun and authentic to people’s engagement and experience with the game. And if you’re rigorous about that, then these things can happen.”
There were times when A Minecraft Movie itself looked like it might not happen. In 2014, a pair of producers — Roy Lee, who co-produced The Lego Movie, and Jill Messick, whose credits included Mean Girls — secured the Minecraft rights from Swedish game developer Mojang AB and brought them to Warner Bros. Over the years, the project cycled through directors, Microsoft bought the game, and the Warner studio itself was sold twice. Messick died in 2018, but retains a producer credit for the film.
Over the years, there were different ideas about how to bring Minecraft to the big screen, which was not a straightforward proposition. It is a “sandbox” game, meaning players pursue their own interests and there are no set objectives or storylines — a lack of structure that could pose challenges for scriptwriters.
And as the team tried to craft the right story, the game exploded in popularity. Now it has roughly 200mn monthly users who create their own adventures in a blocky world where they build structures and collect resources.
Minecraft was also lacking in characters. In early versions of the script, the story was not centred around Steve, the game’s generic, default character who is played by Black in the film. But it all began to take shape when director Jared Hess, who made Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre with Black, signed on to the film in 2022.
After nearly 15 years of trying to make a Minecraft movie, Ehrman says Warner Bros ended up with “the right team at the right price and the right moment to finally get this thing finally made”.
Now it may be time to start all over. The success of A Minecraft Movie almost guarantees there will be a sequel. “I mean, we’d be foolish not to,” says Ehrman. “The fans want more, so hopefully we’ll be able to figure something out.”
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