The Minecraft movie trailer has attracted 26 million views on YouTube in three days, but it has also garnered a fully underwater ratio of likes to dislikes. That would be 573,000 to 1.1 million, and it is truly not often you see something like this cross a full million dislikes.
It’s representative and how terribly the Minecraft trailer was received online, channeling a bizarre blocky-but-not-game-blocky animation style for its Minecraft world, with an eclectic cast slapped on a very obvious greenscreen, including Jason Momoa with the strangest haircut you’ve ever seen.
The most meme-worthy part of the trailer is the appearance of Jack Black as Steve, the main character of Minecraft, where he simply looks like…everyday Jack Black in a blue shirt, with his now-signature wild hair and grey-streaked beard. It’s absolutely bizarre. Now, after Black voicing Bowser in the Super Mario Bros. Movie, Black voicing Claptrap in the Borderlands movie and him playing Steve in this Minecraft movie, the public has soured a bit on his non-stop game adaptatation appearances. (Plus there was the whole thing about him selling out his longtime partner Kyle Gass over his political views).
There are two fundamental, deeply weird things about this movie:
1) There’s no real explanation as to why this needed to feature live-action actors, as this is the equivalent of Chris Pratt dressing up in a red shirt and overalls falling into the Super Mario Bros. world in that movie, which obviously would have been terrible.
2) It’s unclear why the film decided to do this weirdly warped block style in the film instead of, you know, making the entire movie play out in Minecraft itself, which easily could have been possible. You know, like how the LEGO movie was made using…LEGOs? It’s a huge missed opportunity.
The terrible trailer has sparked a debate about how the people hating on it are not who it’s “for,” as the idea is that kids are going to show up regardless because well, it’s Minecraft, one of the most popular games of all time that is still massively popular to this day. Plenty of terrible kids movies have made lots of money, and this one, more than most, seems destined to. But kids are also not stupid, and the audience for this may skew older and more judgemental. I’ve heard anecdotally that many young fans are weirded out by how it looks too, but again, it is hard to imagine this is not going to gross hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars no matter what.
This does in fact remind me of Borderlands in that it was easy to view that trailer and simply know that movie was going to be bad, which it was. Here, it seems like there is almost no chance the Minecraft movie will be good. It’s just a matter of how much money it will make despite being bad. Probably a lot.
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