It may have taken around 10 years of on-and-off development, but a big-screen Minecraft movie is finally on its way. Warner Bros. Pictures released the long-awaited first trailer for the film, aptly titled A Minecraft Movie, in early September to mixed responses from both casual viewers and die-hard video game fans alike. While some seemed to immediately buy into the Jared Hess-directed film’s bright, colorful look and heightened, family-friendly sense of humor, others have already found its digital aesthetic and tone a bit off-putting.
Unsurprisingly, the film’s producers and creative team seem intent on winning over as many existing Minecraft fans as they can. During the online 2024 Minecraft Live event, a new clip from A Minecraft Movie was unveiled that fittingly focuses on the art of crafting in the cubic fictional realm of the Overworld. In the clip, expert crafter Steve (Jack Black) introduces two of the film’s Overworld newbies, Garrett (Jason Momoa) and Henry (Sebastian Hansen), to a crafting table and explains how to use it by creating an iron sword out of just a handful of materials and a hammer.
Unfortunately, when Momoa’s Garrett attempts to one-up Steve by showing off his own crafting skills, things don’t go how he expects.
Fans will no doubt be happy to see that the elements Steve uses to craft his sword, as well as the pattern he forms with them, all line up perfectly with how you create an iron sword of your own in Minecraft. Garrett’s pair of chain-linked buckets, however, seems to be an item unique to A Minecraft Movie. Players will have to wait to see whether it gets added to the game at some point in conjunction with the film’s 2025 release.
A Minecraft Movie still won’t hit theaters for another few months, so fans should likely expect to see a lot more footage from the film between now and then. Whether or not its future trailers and clips manage to sway players’ opinions better than its first teaser remains to be seen. Either way, it doesn’t look like Hollywood plans to back away at all from its ongoing bet on the viability and profitability of video game adaptations.
A Minecraft Movie seems like the kind of gamble that could either pay off extremely well or completely bust. For now, it looks like it’s gotten the crafting part of its source material right, so at least there’s that.
A Minecraft Movie is set to debut in theaters on April 4, 2025.
