Video Games Like Minecraft Are Replacing Superheroes As Hollywood’s Dominant IP

Blame Chicken Jockey. About two-thirds of the way through A Minecraft Movie, the $150 million live-action adaptation of Mojang Studios’ epochal video game, Jack Black and Jason Momoa’s gamers-in-a-strange-land characters find themselves in a boxing ring in a purported fight to the death. At first, they’re facing down a chicken rendered in the game’s signature cubic blocks. Then a mysterious box descends from the ceiling to deposit a tiny zombie rider onto the clucking bird’s back: a real, if exceedingly rare, in-game occurrence. Inside movie theaters when this scene — in which Black dementedly bellows, “Chicken Jockey!” — has been shown, the effect has been undisguised pandemonium: tween and teen audience members throwing popcorn, screaming along with the dialogue, filming TikToks, and, in one notable case, being escorted from the multiplex by cops for getting too wild. (A New Jersey theater has banned “unaccompanied groups of boys” from Minecraft screenings owing to the disruptions.)

With Chicken Jockey’s sudden cultural ubiquity (among a sea of A Minecraft Movie memes such as “50 Steves in Times Square”) plugging into an already cultishly devoted game fandom, the Warner Bros. kids’ comedy-thriller has become a surprise global blockbuster. Opening to $163 million domestically and $313.7 million worldwide this past weekend, it overcame a lowly 48 percent Tomatometer score to wildly overshoot even the most optimistic prerelease “tracking” estimates that predicted a North American tally somewhere in the $70 million to $90 million range. The macroeconomics: That’s the biggest opening of the year, the biggest three-day total for a video-game movie ever, as well as Minecraft distributor Warner Bros.’ third-most-lucrative opening of all time.

Notwithstanding the floppage of director Eli Roth’s craptacular quasi-adaptation of the Gearbox Software game Borderlands last summer, video-game movies have been overperforming at the box office with striking regularity. In an era when it’s not uncommon for a successful video game to gross $20 billion across its commercial lifetime — but when gaming is still regarded as a kind of nerdy cousin to Hollywood by cultural gatekeepers — the movie version of Five Nights at Freddy’s (which took in $297.1 million on a $20 million budget), Paramount’s reliably lucrative Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, and 2023’s $1.36 billion–grossing The Super Mario Bros. Movie all punched above their presumed weight.

Viewed a certain way, A Minecraft Movie’s chicken-jockeying triumph represents a new recognition within Hollywood: a kind of changing of the guard at a time when Marvel Cinematic Universe entries are delivering diminishing returns. “Video-game movies are overtaking superhero movies as the genre of choice,” says Jeff Bock, senior box-office analyst for Exhibitor Relations. “These are the myths and stories that many generations gravitate toward. While gaming may not be as cool or as flashy [as film], if you make the right movie based on a game, this shows the people will come. This is relatively new IP just crushing — crushing — the estimates.”

To hear it from an executive at a rival studio, A Minecraft Movie connected as family-friendly fare in a commercial vacuum left by the commercial misfire of Disney’s megabudget live-action version of Snow White last month. More crucially, however, Warner Bros. seems to have taken key lessons from the way Marvel developed comic-book superheroes for the screen in adapting the Swedish sandbox title that happens to be the best-selling video game of all time. The studio went “super–on-brand, doing every little thing that fans want, from the costumes to the bad guys to the attitude,” this exec says. “Minecraft has 125 million active daily users. Daily. That number is crazy! And they don’t play it for 30 seconds. They play for hours. I don’t think people realize that number is increasing month over month — not like, Oh, that was ten years ago. It’s just a massive brand that they hit dead-on. To me, the hero is whoever got the rights [to the game]. It’s a massive piece of IP.”

With his wild-eyed brand of manic sincerity, Black has evolved into what Scott Mendelson in Puck calls “a butts-in-seats movie star for big films aimed at little audiences.” And, indeed, the School of Rock star is responsible for Minecraft’s most TikTok-able catchphrases: “flint and steel,” “I … am Steve,” “the Nether!” and “crushing loaf” among them. According to Dana Nussbaum, Warner Bros. executive vice-president of worldwide marketing, and Christian Davin, its EVP of worldwide-marketing strategy, the studio operated outside of prescribed promotional norms to honor the game’s spirit of creativity. That meant enabling fan-made content in all its forms to generate heightened levels of audience awareness. The upshot: A Minecraft Movie trended No. 1 across YouTube, X and TikTok during each major “beat” of the promo campaign, a rare full-platform sweep. The #IAmSteve TikTok challenge inspired over 13,000 fan-made videos using official sound from the movie. Also on TikTok, the hashtags #MinecraftMovie and #AMinecraftMovie hit 2.4 billion views with 301 million likes and 42 million shares: massive fan participation on a global scale.

“We didn’t want to take something and serve it up to them,” Nussbaum says. “We wanted to give them the tools — or the building blocks, if you will — and then create it with them. That idea of not only encouraging but inviting the audience was something people really responded to. It really helped build the idea that this film is not something you just watch but something you experience. Not since The Rocky Horror Picture Show have we seen audiences engage in this way.”

Davin points out that what Warner Bros. didn’t do was as important as what it did. “There’s a different scenario where we’re more draconian with our IP protections and we’re asking for take-downs because you’re filming a screen in a theater,” he says. “Instead, we’re like, This feels like culture is happening, and we want to be a part of culture right now. So we didn’t have X or TikTok or any of the other social-media platforms issue take-downs.”

Hitting multiplexes on the heels of back-to-back Warner Bros.–distributed flops — the $45 million Robert De Niro crime drama The Alto Knights, which has taken in a mere $9.4 million worldwide, and director Bong Joon Ho’s quietly polemical Mickey 17 ($127 million on a $118 million budget) — Minecraft is providing a much-needed shot in the arm for the studio at a time of perceived crisis. In recent weeks, Warner co-chieftains Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy have reportedly incurred the displeasure of Warner Bros.–Discovery’s impatient, staff-slashing, finished-movie-canceling head honcho, David Zaslav, for overspending (on expensive new projects from directors Ryan Coogler and Paul Thomas Anderson, among others) and underdelivering with the pricey box-office fiascoes Joker: Folie à Deux and Furiosa. Just days shy of Abdy and De Luca joking about “keeping this job for two more years” at Las Vegas’s CinemaCon, the surprisingly robust Minecraft supremacy is understood as a positive augury for Warner Bros.’ upcoming slate of summer tentpoles: Coogler’s mysterious vampire thriller, Sinners (April 18); the vroomy Brad Pitt race-car thriller, F1 (June 27); and DCEU boss-director James Gunn’s all-important Man of Steel reboot, Superman (July 11). Another rival-studio executive with inside knowledge of Minecraft’s production process, however, points out the win is not Warner Bros.’ alone, assigning partial credit to the movie’s production company, Legendary Entertainment, and its production chairwoman, Mary Parent. “Mike and Pam are going to try to use this as their comeback, but Mary Parent played a huge part in coming up with a concept that made sense,” this exec says. “Legendary does really well with this video game–y, World of Warcraft–type of stuff. Legendary really put this on track.”

Most industry observers and studio insiders expect A Minecraft Movie’s second-weekend box-office returns to decline by about 60 percent — which would still be a healthy gross, coming in way above prerelease estimates. With the understanding that video-game movies are fast replacing superhero fare as Hollywood’s most reliably lucrative product, Paramount announced a January 2027 release date for The Angry Birds Movie 3 earlier this week. And anticipation continues to build for Sony’s live-action adaptation of the long-running Nintendo video-game series The Legend of Zelda (due out March 2027). “That’s a home run. That’s the one everyone is excited about,” says our first rival-studio exec. “But the one game everyone is chasing is Grand Theft Auto. That’s billion-dollar box office right there. Rockstar Games will never do it, though. I keep telling our people, ‘Go have dinner with them. Go have drinks. Do whatever you have to do. Get that franchise!’”