Warner Bros. is at last revealing the first teaser trailer for its Minecraft movie, headlined by Jason Momoa, Jack Black (Jumanji), Emma Myers (Happy! ), Danielle Brooks (Orange Is the New Black), and Sebastian Eugene Hansen. Netflix released the trailer people had been waiting months for on Thursday—but it didn’t launch quite as Netflix hoped and instantly reignited a conversation of criticism across social media. How could an adaptation of a classic game be so despised? Let’s break it down.
Trailer Misfire
It’s also a one-minute trailer that plays like an unexpectedly weird visual trip through the world of Minecraft. For starters, Jason Momoa’s awkward new hair cut is seemingly being dubbed one of the worst styles that have ever passed through his thinning top. And of course there is all that ultrabright green screening, resulting in things moving about at a strangely unnatural pace. The CGI was par for the course—how else would you bring a blocky world to life? But the choice of inserting live-action actors into a hyper-stylized, un-gatelike world was befuddling and disappointing to most.
Fans naturally assumed that a Minecraft film would lean on the style of the game itself—simple, pixelated, and aesthetically charming. In reality, the trailer presents a noticeable juxtaposition of real-life characters in a computer-generated world that bears no resemblance to how we remember it. Jack Black stopped by and was… Jack Black, because he’s voicing Steve, the silent protagonist of Minecraft. Momoa, meanwhile, appears to have taken the goofiness of it all in stride with a little wig and costume nonsense. But even so, it’s still an odd contrast within this bizarre new Minecraft universe.
The wrong medium?
The movie’s blending of live action with the CGI Minecraft world is one of its biggest points of criticism. Fans have been asking—why didn’t they get Job die their wish and create something that could be perfectly in style, being animated with Legos? Sure thing, but when all you have are real actors acting on pipes in a digital world, it just looks weird and out of place.
Now, it’s not that live-action adaptations of games are simply impossible to do. Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu have discovered that balance in translating digital worlds to a living world. On the LEGO side of things, however, we got movies that fully embraced animation; they looked straight at you like, duh. For Minecraft, that would probably have been a safe bet (similarly styled to their character animation). The trailer does not leave much of an impression otherwise, at least in part because it comes off as a hodgepodge of elements that simply do not seem to fit together.
The Social Media Backlash
The trailer was immediately mocked online. Minecraft turns into one of the worst-looking live-action movies I’ve ever seen. One viewer expressed confusion about why they decided to have live actors in a Minecraft world, as depicted on paper, due to how perfect it is for animation. This is the worst green screen ever. Another said, “I mean, you know, going in, I’m not expecting anything amazing… but this is just amazing.” My goodness.”
The reason why they are mad is Mother Fucking Minecraft.
Whatever you think of the game, it’s more than a video game. A big fanbase— With more than 300 million copies sold and over a trillion views of Minecraft content on YouTube (seriously), it’s safe to say around about now that the masses are quite enamored with the game. Its community has used the game to build everything from complicated hamster wheels to elaborate yet eerie animated videos and even their own written lore that conforms with what happens in-game. It is one of the more iconic minimalistic pixel art games, and its hours-long lo-fi soundtrack can be listened to on loop. The same could be said for the charm of those books and, in many ways, failed to translate over from page onto screen help either; at least so goes the opinion of most who have watched this trailer.
This Is Why the Trailer Feels So Out of Place
The thing is the trailer makes it look like something—ozone so cookie-cutter that many comparisons likened its style to what an AI might think a Minecraft movie would be but come on. The terrible combination of live action and CGI made the visuals look cheap and fake. Nor was the slightly awkward Jack Black-starring cameo from Steve, who has always been more of an avatar character than a man anyway.
Reliable watchers have also said this is not the first go at games-to-movies turned out wrong. The scary CGI Sonic trailer for the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie suffered a similar fate and got changed with backlash from fans. Although Sonic’s design has been fixed, right now the entire way of thinking about how a Minecraft movie is made seems completely broken.
A Missed Opportunity?
Minecraft is digital LEGO, where players can go on adventures and build/create basically whatever they dream up. The movie was anticipated to be a portrayal of that creative spirit, wallowing in the boundless possibilities. But it looks like the film is going in a different direction, using Hollywood’s most overused plot device: “We’re trapped inside of this video game!
That, as one online poster commented, “looks rubbish; we’ll be watching though.” A fair summary of the prevailing sentiment—like others, I feel a strong mix of both frustration and morbid curiosity. Still, the film is set to be a huge box-office success despite the controversy. At least, families with children will go to the theatre and see what a big-budget feature version of Minecraft looks like once it gets there.
Final Thoughts
This will give the filmmakers time to put some polish on the visuals before they open in theatres on April 4, 2025, and maybe win a few of those skeptical fans over. The first trailer definitely establishes a formidable bar to meet. Game adaptations are hit and miss in Hollywood, of course (mostly mis), but it feels like the Minecraft movie might be another case where a creative team just doesn’t get what makes its source material so special to begin with.
The film itself still needs to prove all that. What is clear, though, is that whatever comes next from the saga of Westworld will be successful—eeven if it’s all a bit messy. Minecraft is all about creation after all—hhopefully this flick can create something fans would be willing to sit through (more than once).
