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After a mere two weekends, “A Minecraft Movie” has claimed the top spot of the 2025 domestic box office. It’s not shocking that this franchise piece beat out January fare, but since then we’ve had an MCU entry and this movie just blew right past it. And I have to ask: Why?

Okay, I know why. It’s because the video game is popular. But bad movies based on popular video games flop all the time, why is this one in particular bucking the trend? Does the video game just have that big of a fanbase that they can turn it into a hit where so many similar attempts have failed? Or did fans and non-fans alike see the advertising for this movie and think that there might be a good movie here?
I’m inclined to believe it’s the former, because I did not see any version of the advertising that made the movie seem like anything more than the hackery that it is.
Jack Black stars as Steve, a lifelong fan of mining who stumbles across a portal to another dimension called the Overworld. The new setting allows Steve to arrange the environment however he wants using the building blocks at his disposal, most of which are literal blocks, as in cubes. But he runs afoul of local pig-like villain Malgosha (Rachel House), who wants to shut down creativity at all costs.
She has Steve arrested, but he hands off the portal-orb to his dog Dennis for hiding on Earth so it can’t fall into the wrong hands. The orb falls into what may or may not be the wrong hands.
The orb falls into the hands of fledgling arcade owner Garrett “The Garbageman” Garrison (Jason Momoa), who buys Steve’s abandoned things at a storage unit sale. He, along with a creative child he’s mentoring named Henry (Sebastian Hansen), are sucked into the Overworld, along with Henry’s adult sister (Emma Myers) and the siblings’ real estate agent (Danielle Brooks). The movie has no idea to do with three of these characters, they’re just there to pad out the cast beyond Black and Momoa, who are basically playing the same burnout-with-rock-n-roll-energy anyway.
A conditionally-released Steve teaches the newcomers how to survive in the Overworld, which includes introducing them to all sorts of bells and whistles that I’m sure are familiar to fans of the game.
They also have to go on a quest to find their way home, which includes fending off zombies, pig armies, and even a monster riding a chicken for a literal chicken fight. A better movie would probably have the heroes try to make friends with the different races, but here they’re just enemies to either kill, evade, or knock aside while trying to attain a larger goal for themselves.
This movie is a mess. The jokes aren’t funny, the action isn’t interesting, and the writers were apparently all working on different movies. How else to explain the sincere tone of the Natalie-raising-Henry storyline or the painful tangent where an Overworld villager stumbles into the real world and begins dating Henry’s vice-principal (Jennifer Coolidge)? And none of it makes me want to play the “Minecraft” game.
I’m not much of a video game person anyway (which yes, means I’m not the movie’s target audience, though I seriously doubt knowledge of the game would have endeared me to these underdeveloped characters), but a good adaptation knows how to cultivate new fans of the source material.
As glad as I am that people are going to the movies, it baffles me that their choice is “A Minecraft Movie.”
Grade: D
“A Minecraft Movie” is rated PG for violence/action, language, suggestive/rude humor and some scary images. Its running time is 101 minutes.

Robert Garver holds a degree in Cinema Studies from New York University. He has been a movie reviewer since 2006. More reviews can be found online at www.bobatthemovies.com. Feedback is welcome at rrg251@nyu.edu.