The box office is a surprising beast. Films formatted to gross hundreds of millions of dollars barely manage to recoup their losses, like Disney's disastrous Snow White, while others generate unexpected audience enthusiasm. Such is the case with Minecraft, which has already to break a first record.
Minecraft, surprise success?
This adaptation of the video games of the same name by Jared Hess was released this week in theaters, and it is already standing out of the competition. As a reminder, Minecraft is the best-selling game in the world, with some 300 million copies sold since its release. Although the film starring Jack Black, Jason Momoa, Emma Myers, and Jennifer Coolidge bears the same name, you don't need to be a fan of the original material to understand it. The story, very simple, is aimed primarily at neophytes: a quartet of baroque characters is suddenly thrown through a mysterious portal leading to The Surface, a universe of cubic shapes that is malleable thanks to the imagination. Despite this basic pitch, which the film never manages to transcend (the reviews are also quite bad), Minecraft is off to a flying start at the box office!
Minecraft is off to a flying start at the box office
Despite being rated PG in the US for violence/action, language, suggestive/crude humor, and some scary images, Minecraft is a massive draw for moviegoers. According to estimates from our colleagues at Deadline, it is expected to gross over $135 million in its opening weekend at the domestic box office. It is both the first film of the year to exceed $100 million in its opening weekend, and the best opening weekend of 2025 so far. Captain America: Brave New World is second, with $88.8 million in its first weekend of release in February. This rather impressive score is somewhat disturbing; indeed, as mentioned, the feature film was received very coldly by both audiences and critics. Some journalists have even called Minecraft the "worst film of 2025." However, it may well be able to recoup its budget and exceed its break-even point. In doing so, the (admittedly very relative) success of Minecraft: The Movie could send a very bad signal to the industry... Indeed, as everyone knows, the film adaptation of Mojang Studios' flagship license is produced and distributed by Warner Bros. Discovery, which is going through an extremely difficult period. Several of its biggest recent films have been resounding failures, such as George Miller's Furiosa, Todd Philips' Joker: Folie à Deux, Kenji Kamiyama's The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim, and Bong Joon-ho's Mickey 17. How can we explain that among these films, Minecraft is the only one to have exceeded $100 million for its opening weekend? Because despite its PG label, the film's real target audience remains children and young teenagers. The other great monumental success of video game adaptations remains Super Mario Bros. (2023), which holds the record for the best opening weekend for a video game adaptation with $146.4 million: will Minecraft do better? The bets are on, and until then, we leave you with a short list of video games that deserve a film adaptation.
0 Comments