A Minecraft Movieis a gigantic hit. A few weeks after hitting theaters, it’s already earnedmore than half a billion dollars at the global box office(and counting). Movie theaters needed something like this, as the first quarter of 2025 has been a rough time for cinema.
Though low- and mid-budget movies (like One of Them Days, Dog Man, and The Monkey) doing well is good for their distributors, the business still relies on tentpole releases to keep things running. After Snow White, Mickey 17, and Captain America: Brave New World all failed to connect, A Minecraft Movie prompted a sigh of relief.
A New Generation Of Moviegoers
But that’s all box office talk. Minecraft’s success isn’t only good because it’s good for business – it’s also good because (as Sean Fennessyargued on a recent episode of The Big Picture podcast) it’s introducing a younger generation to the joy of moviegoing with an IP that actually belongs to their generation.
Gen Z and Alpha have grown up on theMCUandStar Warsand, while those movies have obviously been successful, they’re coasting on ideas and source material from the ’60s and ’70s. Minecraft is something these kids have matured alongside, and seeing a world they know and love on the big screen (and doing so in screeningswhere everyone is going apesh*t) is going to help implant the bug that keeps many of them coming back to the movies for the rest of their lives.
And yes, I believe movie theaters will be around that long.
I say that while also beingexhaustedby the era of IP filmmaking. I want to see more original movies. I want to see more comedies get the chance to become big theatrical hits. I want to live in a world where a drama for grown-ups like Rain Man or a sci-fi movie for grown-ups like Gravity or an action movie for grown-ups like Air Force One can be among the biggest movies of the year.
That’s not to say I want stories based on existing material to go away entirely. As I was writing the above paragraph, I kept having to choose new films for the last sentence because I kept picking movies that were based on books or short stories. Great films like Arrival and Kramer Vs. Kramer and The Godfather and Jaws and The Silence of the Lambs were all based on existing material.
IP Isn’t All Bad
Which brings me to why I’m making peace with A Minecraft Movie likely being the biggest movie of the year. The movies that turned me into a cinephile,The Lord of the Ringstrilogy, were based on books. One of my fondest childhood memories is going on a field trip to see The Chronicles of Narnia in fifth grade. I have complicated feelings about the whole property now, but seeing theHarry Pottermovies in theaters was one of the recurring joys of my youth, as I grew up with the characters, and rewatching them at Christmas helped reinforce my love of movies.
Those IP movies got me hooked on cinema. I became obsessed with the process of filmmaking by watching the many behind-the-scenes featurettes that came with the LOTR extended edition DVDs. From there, I started watching TV shows about the process of making movies on cable, thanks to ReelzChannel. I bought endless DVDs and Blu-rays. In college, I traveled 45 minutes to the nearest city with arthouse theaters to see movies by Wes Anderson and Bong Joon Ho and Richard Linklater. Now, at 31, I have an AMC Stubs A-List membership and go to at least one movie a week. I’ve got a modest collection of Criterions. The beginning of that journey was an IP movie.
A New Era Of Film Culture
The current generation has an even shorter walk to hardcore cinephilia. If they have a Letterboxed, they’ll see Black Bag and Anora and Mickey 17 in the “Popular this week” carousel when they go to log Minecraft. One of their friends may log an arthouse film and then, suddenly, Krzysztof Kieślowski or Ingmar Bergman or Abbas Kiarostami is on their radar. They might get recommended a Letterboxd “Four Favorites” video after watching the same star do Hot Ones. TikTok and Reddit and Twitter are full of film content that’s just an algorithmic push away.
If A Minecraft Movie is the gateway drug that gets kids invested in cinema, that’s a good thing. Today, Steve. Tomorrow, Steven Spielberg.
