Minecraft, made by Mojang studios in 2009, has been regarded as one of the greatest games of all time. It instantly became popular with its unique concept and opportunity for players to express themselves.
Through social media, mainly video-streaming platform Youtube, Minecraft started to quickly grow in popularity. In the game, people built and conquered words with their friends and others online.
Over the years, Minecraft was popular among all age groups. Following years of popularity, Warner Bros Entertainment announced the idea of creating a movie. Over the next couple months, this idea quickly turned into reality.
After years and years of the movie being delayed–it was originally slotted for release in 2022–the production was on the go. Warner Bros Entertainment Inc. announced there would be an official movie based off the game Minecraft released in 2025.
On social media, there was a lot of discussion about this prospect. People who played the actual game questioned if there was enough from the game to make a whole movie out of it.
The studio addressed this by creating a character from outside the game, who loves to create, build and mine things. This young man, Steve, finds his way into an abandoned cave, where he comes across an orb. The orb creates some sort of portal leading to the Minecraft world, which is referred to as the Overworld in the movie.
When he gets there, he enjoys time in solidarity with his dog Dennis. Eventually, he ends up in the Nether, or the Underworld, where a species called Piglins hijack the cube and kidnap him and Dennis.
The lead Pigling Malgosha plans to wage war on the Overworld with the cube; however, Dennis the dog is able abscond with the cube back to the normal world and hide it under Steve’s bed. Steve, on the other hand, remains locked away with no way of return.
This sets up the rest of the movie and introduces viewers to some new characters: a brother named Henry and sister Natalie. The siblings have recently moved to the small, affordable town of Chuglas, Idaho, a town known only for their potato chips and nothing else to do.
Viewers then meet a man named Garrett who had previously won The World Video Game Championship but has been on a downhill slope since. He owns a small shop which sells movies, records and video games. Unfortunately, his he was going out of business, and it looked like it was over for Garrett the Garbage Man.
With hopes of making any kind of money, Garrett attends a garage sale, which includes Steve’s belongings. Garrett ends up purchasing this garage with all the money he has remaining which was comically about $10.
In the garage, Garrett discovers the orb but sees nothing else of value; he seems on the verge of tears, fearing this is the end for his shop.
Then Henry, the little boy who just moved to Chuglas, enters the picture. He and Garrett the Garbage Man became friends after Garrett got him out of trouble with the school. Henry is visiting the shop and finds the orb and decides to put the two pieces together. This leads to same cave in which Steve found the two pieces.
The portal then opens up. The sister of Henry who had moved with him and the realtor who sold them their new house found them in this abandoned cave. The next thing that we see is all of them jumping into the portal and being teleported into the Minecraft world.
There, the camera pans across a valley and beauty of this new and undiscovered world. All of the characters are stunned looking at this new place with a sense of excitement of what is to come.
This was the audience’s first look at all the money that Warner Bros dropped on the computer-generated imagery (CGI), in order to unveil this beautiful scene.
Personally, it was a little underwhelming. They had a budget of $150 million, and for all of that it is a little glitchy and didn’t look as good as most envisioned it would.
Malgosha, the evil pig, senses the orb is back in the world, and in order to be able to take over both the Minecraft and normal world, she releases Steve to go retrieve the orb for her. Tricking and convincing him that his dog is being held hostage, forcing him to do as she asks.
That was the main plot of the movie. From that point on, it held the audience’s attention, despite the CGI of the movie being overlooked and not as well done as what can be seen in a big movie production.
Overall, the experience of this movie was powered by social media. In the movie, Steve yells out “Chicken Jockey.” On TikTok, it became a trend to throw your food and drinks in the theatre.
It goes to show that through social = media, anything is possible. A movie whose trailer looked terrible got big attention from TikTok and social media.
The question is, was it worth the watch? Yes, I can confidently say that this movie was worth the hype and was overall a good viewing experience. Not just the movie, the way a community can come together and support something they all share an interest in is awesome to see.
My overall opinion of this movie, despite the jokes that it can present, is that it is one of the better movies created off of some .
While the CGI and not the best it could have been, for the nostalgia that this game presents for teens and young adults, it accurately represented the enjoyment people get from playing such a classic game.
