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I was perhaps a bit uncharitable when the first Minecraft movie teaser dropped in 2024, and by “uncharitable” I mean that I may have sent off several emails to the Hague to complain about the commission of crimes against humanity. A bit extreme, perhaps, but I’m hardly the only one who was appalled by what they beheld: On YouTube, the teaser is currently rocking 737,000 likes, and 1.8 million dislikes. That’s a yikes, as the kids most certainly no longer say.
No matter how plainly bad that teaser is (and look, I know it’s for kids but it is bad and I will not be stepping down from this hill), the strength of the negativity caught one notable person off-guard: A Minecraft Movie star Jack Black.
“I mean, I was surprised, because I loved the trailer,” Black told GamesRadar. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to go over great. And, you know, there’s always so many people that are sensitive to everything you put out there.”
I’m not entirely clear what sort of sensitivity Black was referring to, unless he meant it like, this movie offends my sensibilities, which fits but isn’t really the same thing. In any event, his confidence in the trailer, coupled with the wide, vocal public dislike, apparently left him badly shook: “I love the movie, but now I’m like, I don’t know. Let’s see what everyone else thinks, because I don’t trust myself anymore.”
To be fair to Black, it’s possible that the reaction to the trailer (and more specifically his role in it) was amplified because it’s his followup to Borderlands, the 2024 big screen catastrophe that earned him not just one but two Razzie Award nominations. (He didn’t win either, by the way.)
He actually had one post-Borderlands film drop in 2024, Dear Santa, but it was direct-to-streaming so not really on the same scale. It also earned him another Razzie nom, so you can understand why some people might sort of reflexively recoil from more of this:
Black’s mugging fizzog wasn’t the only problem with the teaser, or even the problem at all necessarily. Director Jared Hess said in the same interview that “there was a lot of stuff in that teaser that was out of context.” Subsequent trailers, which have looked somewhat less bad, did a better job of showcasing “the tone of what this movie is and really what the movie is all about.”
“We always had confidence in the film that we were making, just because we, you know, we’ve been testing it, and just the reaction that we had from die-hard Minecraft fans was amazing,” Hess said. “Now we’re just at this amazing point where being able to share the film with everybody has just been incredible.”
Despite the shaky start, and his shaken confidence, Black apparently believes the Minecraft movie is what humanity needs right now: “There’s so much violence and war and hatred,” he said at the film’s world premiere in London. “And that’s what I love about this movie—there’s a lot of love in it and there’s a lot of creativity.”
A Minecraft Movie, as it’s properly known, debuts in the US on April 4. Good or bad, we rather strongly suspect it will make a trillion dollars.
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Kurt Indovina
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