The first Minecraft Movie trailer was a mess. It felt tonally off, the humor didn’t quite land, and the live-action aesthetic was disorienting. Stars Jack Black and Jason Momoa seemed like they were acting in different galaxies. Kids will probably still love the finished thing anyway, but swarms of online commenters were immediately put off. The adaptation’s leadership gets it. “We were ready for everything,” they said.
A Minecraft Movie director Jared Hess and producer Torfi Frans Olafsson, who oversees the Minecraft franchise, recently responded to the reaction to the first trailer in an interview with IGN. “I mean, look, we knew this game represents so many different things to so many different people,” Hess said. “We knew that whatever we led out with, there was going to be strong opinions across the spectrum of what people were expecting, what they wanted it to be. Everybody brings their own special personal connection to the game.”
One of the big questions was why the Minecraft movie is live-action with tons of VFX instead of just being completely CGI-animated as fans may have expected a movie based on the hit survival crafting game to be. A fan-made trailer that was basically a shot-for-shot remake of the official one, only in Minecraft itself, seemed designed to provoke this question and quickly went viral.
“I mean, that was one of the things [fans were saying in response to the trailer]: ‘Why is it live action? Why isn’t it animated?’ I think a lot of people were expecting that, and just the fact that there was live action and directly real-life characters and physical sets didn’t feel right with them, because in their imagination, they’ve been playing it for a very long time,” Olafsson told IGN. “And they’ve kind of projected and seen a bunch of content obviously that’s been made both by us, the community, we’ve made a story mode. We made animated content before, and there’s a lot of it out there.”
Olafsson explained that one of the reasons to do a live-action adaptation was precisely because it was different and hadn’t already been done before. It was also something that had been put in motion long ago. Warner Bros. began working with Minecraft maker Mojang to produce a movie as far back as 2014, and the current version set to release in 2025 is the result of a long and messy process, with the project changing creative hands several times.
“This movie’s been in development for a very, very long time,” Olafsson said. “A lot of the people who will see it were not born when the first contracts and the first discussions were had, and there was always going to be live action.”
According to Hess, there were also a lot of things, like Momoa using the crafting table, that just didn’t come across right in the rapidly edited context of the initial trailer. The duo seem confident that the way those gameplay elements are communicated and fleshed out in the movie itself will make a lot more sense to long-time fans.
Apparently, early test audiences agree. The pair say early screenings of the Minecraft movie, even without completed VFX, have garnered positive feedback, unlike that first trailer. “People are like, ‘This is nothing like the trailer. This movie is awesome,’” Olafsson said. The movie is set to release on April 4 of next year. A second trailer, released today, looks a lot better.