By Joshua Tyler
| Published
When people look back on the year 2025 in movies, there’s going to be one movie that’s top of mind: A Minecraft Movie. It’s the biggest movie of the year, and a cultural touchstone. Try shouting “chicken jockey” in a crowd and see what happens, if you don’t believe me. While I wouldn’t have recommended watching A Minecraft Movie in theaters, if you’ve avoided it, now is the right time to change that and stream, just so you know what’s happening.
Please hold on, before you rebel against the notion of sitting through Jack Black parading his belly in front of a green screen, allow me to make my case.
There’s a version of A Minecraft Movie that could’ve been brilliant. You see flashes of it in the first twenty minutes, where we’re dropped into a surreal little Idaho town that feels like it was built entirely out of Napoleon Dynamite’s imagination.
There’s this off-kilter, hand-crafted magic to the real-world sequences, full of weird neighbors, passive-aggressive teachers, and family dynamics that feel like they were written on a lunch napkin during a school play. Emma Myers, in particular, shines there, giving Natalie a deadpan spark that makes you wish the entire movie had stayed right there in Idaho.
But, of course, that’s not what this movie is.
Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre) knew what he was doing in these early scenes. Once we enter the world of Minecraft itself, those fingerprints get smudged out by blocks, blur, and the unmistakable sheen of too much green screen.
That’s when A Minecraft Movie pivots into fantasy. In Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison’s (Jason Momoa) dusty game shop, a boy named Henry (Sebastian Hansen) combines two mysterious artifacts, the Orb of Dominance and Earth Crystal, to open a portal into Minecraft’s Overworld. Natalie, Henry, Garrett, and for some reason Natalie’s realtor Dawn, are sucked through the portal together into a cube-fueled universe.
Everything’s colorful, and the plot keeps moving, so it’s never boring. The real problem is that the Minecraft world looks fake. Not in the “intentionally pixelated” way of the game, it looks like actors were pasted onto a digital backdrop with no weight, no texture, and no visual charm.
A Minecraft Movie tries to blend realism with Minecraft aesthetics and ends up with a muddy hybrid where nothing feels grounded. You can almost hear the actors yelling their lines into a green void while a VFX team desperately tries to determine what light source should be coming from that lava pool.
None of this matters. Generations of kids have been crazy about Minecraft, and the world was hungry for this movie. So A Minecraft Movie made an insane amount of money and it will be an important cultural milestone for an entire generation.
The movie’s popularity is not waning. For weeks, A Minecraft Movie has been the number one most-streamed movie on HBO Max and was high on the overpriced Amazon rental charts, too.
I wouldn’t have recommended seeing it in theaters, but now that it’s available to watch on HBO, give it a view so you know what the world is talking about. I can’t promise you’ll like A Minecraft Movie, but I can promise you won’t be bored.
A MINECRAFT MOVIE REVIEW SCORE
