As Hollywood Remains Confused By Success Of ‘Minecraft’, Director Offers Simple Explanation For Film’s Box Office Explosion
While the vast majority of Hollywood pundits, analysts, and executives are currently working themselves into a frenzy in the hopes of understanding the explosive success of A Minecraft Movie, director Jared Hess has believes that the answer is far more simple than they realize: Fans just really, really like the IP.
Having climbed its way into theaters on April 4th, the Jack Black and Jason Momoa-led video game adaptation has thus far pulled in more than $172 million at the domestic box office and $150 million internationally for a combined worldwide total of $320 million, in doing so taking home the records for ‘Best Start For A Video Game Movie’ and the best Saturday performance in the history of Warner Bros.
And in one of the most stark displays of industry-audience disconnects seen in recent memory, the break-out performance of the live-action Minecraft outing has left many in Hollywood scrambling to find an explanation for why this movie, even with the widespread acknowledgment that it’s less-than-great, was able to shame such other big budget, youth-friendly releases as Mufasa: The Lion King (a box office of $35.4 million domestic in its opening weekend), Captain America: Brave New World ($88.8 million), and Snow White ($87.3 million).
For example, in her analysis, Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin sought the insights of various Hollywood analysts and consults, eventually walking way with a list of five factors that were allegedly responsible for A Minecraft Movie‘s popularity: “All-audience appeal”, “Marketing tie-ins galore”, “Pent-up demand”, the “video game boom” and a “social media supernova [of discussion]”.
Likewise, though he did acknowledge Hollywood’s near-universal ‘miss’ regarding their Minecraft predictions, Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro attributed large parts of the film’s box office pull to “social media influencers” and a “myriad of marketing stunts”, namely a Happy Meal promotion with McDonald’s.
But according to Hess, these rationalizations ignore the real core of the film’s box office domination, which is that its fan base is not only absolutely massive, but also constantly chomping at the bit for more ways to enjoy the game.
Asked during a recent interview with Deadline‘s Mike Fleming Jr. if he could “put your finger on a few reasons this film resonated”, the director began, “It’s one of those things.”
“There was an immense audience that was so passionate about the game and for whom Minecraft was such a key part of their childhood adolescence, just something that they loved,” said Hess. “The game itself is so creative, but it’s also ridiculous and really funny and absurd in so many ways. That was so much of the appeal to me in adapting it. It was like, how can you just do a ridiculously fun and funny adventure movie in this world — all of those goofy, dorky things we just really tried to celebrate and were super conscious of while making it?”
“When you’re working with Jack Black and Jason Momoa and Daniel Brooks and Jennifer Coolidge and the whole cast, it’s like we just spent a ton of time coming up with what really was funny to us,” the Napoleon Dynamite director continued. “I think one of the things that people are responding to is how dead serious the characters are taking this ridiculous world. Jack is playing everything with so much passion. And when we were shooting, it’d be like, “You know what, Jack, let’s put a little more mustard on that.” And he just takes everything to an 11, all the time. That absurd seriousness about such a ridiculous world is part of the vitality of the comedy. I think that is what people are celebrating.”
Closing out this part of their conversation with a personal anecdote, Hess told Fleming Jr., “Literally right before you called, my nephew lives in New York, he’s in high school, and he went twice over the weekend with friends — he literally Facetimed me from his classroom, and he’s like, ‘Uncle Jared, Hey, hey dude, I’ve got some friends here. They got a question.’ And I said, in Jack’s voice, ‘Water bucket release!’ And dude, that whole classroom just exploded.”
“Then I said, ‘chicken jockey,’ and it went bananas again,” he further detailed. “Once the marketing over the last couple of months really started to kick into gear, and people just really zeroed in on funny quotes in the materials that resonated, it just took on the life of its own. But you can’t ever anticipate that.”
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