The official trailer for the upcoming Minecraft movie, creatively entitled A Minecraft Movie, has arrived, giving us a more detailed rundown of the story and a release date of April 4, 2025. It also continues to look very bad. But not as bad—take that for what it’s worth.
The plot, as we’ve previously discussed, is essentially a reskinned Jumanji: Four misfits are pulled from their less-than-satisfying real-world lives into the Overworld, where they embark upon a quest with a local weirdo to save the realm from the forces of evil, discover the inner qualities that make them unique and beautiful, and are ultimately sent back home and given a second chance to break out of their shells and thrive.
Am I being cynical? Maybe, but I don’t think it’s entirely unfair. Because the film itself looks so cynical: The whole thing screams of design by committee, with that guy you like and that other guy who’s a comfortable anchoring presence because he does the same thing in every role, and of course an origin story because heaven forbid we don’t cram that in somewhere. Throw in some slapstick shenanigans and snarky asides leading into—I’m just guessing here, I haven’t read the script or anything, but I’m pretty confident in staking this one out—forged bonds and a heroic arc in which everyone learns something about themselves and each other, and blammo, you’ve got the next big Hollywood hit—or at least a reliable moneymaker. Right?
Despite my misgivings, the reaction to this trailer seems to be much more positive than the response to the first. That’s a low bar, yes—the first video currently wears more than 1.8 million dislikes, compared to just 730,000 likes—but there’s also some genuine enthusiasm for some of the smaller details on display, like the reference to the “children yearn for the mines” meme and the use of music from the game.
None of which is any guarantee that A Minecraft Movie will be a good movie, but at least there’s a small sense that the production team has an awareness of the game and culture surrounding it, and is injecting some aspect of that into the film. Coupled with the very on-the-nose “Minecraft trailer, take two” opening, it’s pretty clear that Warner is going hard to turn things around after the catastrophe of the initial reveal.
To its credit, Warner has succeeded in elevating my own expectations: I am now open to the possibility that A Minecraft Movie won’t be even worse than the Borderlands film. I still think it’s going to be really bad, but a Rotten Tomatoes score in excess of 10% now seems doable. Hey, take what you can get.
A Minecraft Movie is set to arrive in theaters in North America on April 4, 2025, and will show up internationally two days earlier, on April 2. I am still hoping very much that we make Joshua Wolens watch it.
