The film is also the highest single-day debut ever for a video game movie, with a domestic opening weekend that could reach as high as $150 million, outpacing earlier projections of $70–80 million

A still from ‘A Minecraft Movie’ | Photo Credit: Warner Bros.

A Minecraft Movie has crafted a box office smash. The long-awaited live-action adaptation of the best-selling video game opened to $58 million U.S. gross on Friday, including Thursday previews — the biggest opening day of 2025 to date and the highest single-day debut ever for a video game movie, according to Deadline.

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows, from left, Jack Black, Danielle Brooks and Jason Momoa in a scene from ‘A Minecraft Movie’ | Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Jason Momoa was quite funny in Fast X with his colour-coordinated purple nails and car, and he is the goofy heart of A Minecraft Movie as the winner of an Eighties videogame, Garrett, The Garbage Man. After his big win, Garrett runs a video game store in Chuglass, Idaho.

Mojang’s beloved sandbox shaped a generation’s childhood, but leave it to Hollywood to bulldoze that nostalgia, slap a price tag on the debris, and call it a movie

A still from Minecraft captured in-game | Photo Credit: r/Minecraft

The first thing you hear when you boot up Minecraft is nothing. A soft, patient nothing that waited for you. You linger in the stillness, cursor hovering over “Singleplayer.” As if summoned by memory itself, the synths drift in, just barely there  — melancholic, weightless, familiar. Like an old scent pulling you back to a room you haven’t seen in years, it takes you somewhere instantly. There is a world — your world — somewhere in the depths of that save menu. A childhood frozen in blocks.

It has been more than a decade and a half since Minecraft first landed in the hands of eager players, and in that time, it has gone from indie oddity to the best-selling video game of all time. Yet, its true legacy isn’t in sales figures or sprawling servers but in its ability to capture and preserve a feeling, an ache of remembering a simpler time.

How the ‘Minecraft’ movie undermined nostalgia and ruined a perfect game

Mojang’s beloved sandbox shaped a generation’s childhood, but leave it to Hollywood to bulldoze that nostalgia, slap a price tag on the debris, and call it a movie

A still from Minecraft captured in-game | Photo Credit: r/Minecraft

The first thing you hear when you boot up Minecraft is nothing. A soft, patient nothing that waited for you. You linger in the stillness, cursor hovering over “Singleplayer.” As if summoned by memory itself, the synths drift in, just barely there  — melancholic, weightless, familiar. Like an old scent pulling you back to a room you haven’t seen in years, it takes you somewhere instantly. There is a world — your world — somewhere in the depths of that save menu. A childhood frozen in blocks.

It has been more than a decade and a half since Minecraft first landed in the hands of eager players, and in that time, it has gone from indie oddity to the best-selling video game of all time. Yet, its true legacy isn’t in sales figures or sprawling servers but in its ability to capture and preserve a feeling, an ache of remembering a simpler time.

Which is why there was something almost sacrilegious about watching this beloved relic get fed into Hollywood’s industrial woodchipper and spat out as a soulless, focus-grouped aberration. The Minecraft movie — sorry, A Minecraft Movie— feels precisely like that kind of violation, a bastardisation of the infinite, wondrous, DIY spirit of the game it claims to represent. A game that gave us the gift of boundless creativity has been shackled into a formulaic, green-screened, live-action spectacle, complete with an obnoxious Jack Black in a teal t-shirt, human actors lost in a world that was never meant to house them, and hyper-realistic, Cronenberg-ian mobs that no amount of bleach could scrub clean from memory. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is that we knew, from the moment this film was announced, that it would never work. That the very act of adapting Minecraft was a doomed endeavor. And yet, we still hoped.

A world left behind

For an entire generation, Minecraft was a reality that existed within the confines of our screens. A quiet, sprawling, endlessly generating backyard where summer afternoons stretched into moonlit mining expeditions. It was where friendships were built — sometimes literally, in haphazard fortresses of dirt and mismatched wood. It was where you dug your first cave, lost your first house, fought your first Creeper. And it was where you left something behind, even if you didn’t realise it at the time.

You click on an old world and step inside. The air is still. The torchlight flickers just as it did all those years ago. Your tools remain in the chest, your base standing in its eternally unfinished state. You wander through the space, retracing steps you once knew instinctively. Here is the farm you never quite got around to expanding. There, a forgotten dog sits patiently, waiting for an adventure that will never come.

A still from Minecraft captured in-game | Photo Credit: r/Minecraft

There’s something affecting about revisiting a Minecraft world you haven’t touched in years. The world persists, unchanged. The person who built it does not. You are not the same kid who once ran through these pixelated landscapes, and that realisation stings in a way that is hard to articulate.