On the fateful day of September 4, 2024, a monumental YouTube video was released. Titled A Minecraft Movie | Teaser, Warner Brothers announced the Minecraft Movie. The movie casts Jack Black as protagonist “Craftsman Steve,” Jason Momoa as “The Garbage Man,” and Emma Meyers as “Natalie.” With Minecraft being arguably the most loved video game of all time, having over 300 million downloads as of April 2023, Warner certainly expected a positive reception of the piece. While the audience’s reaction to the movie was big, generating lots of talk and buzz around it, the announcement instantly turned into a social media meme. Trending on TikTok, Instagram, and X from an almost exclusively negative point of view, A Minecraft Movie began to receive massive backlash. The original post on X has 11,000 comments, consisting almost exclusively of “This looks horrible” with hundreds of hidden comments with similar, more aggressive sentiments. Similarly,  a Reddit post blatantly titled “Minecraft movie looks garbage” garnered 36,000 upvotes, showcasing the lack of enthusiasm around the trailer.

 In particular, the design of the movie set stirred controversy. Some argue that “it looks like they ran Minecraft through an AI filter,” commenting on how the combination of CGI and live action created a weird, unsettling, and (as social media puts it) “uncanny valley” vibe. On the topic of AI, other critics on social media claim that the cast appears “AI generated,” or rather has no rhyme or reason to it, adding fuel to the fire with the announcement of Jennifer Coolidge’s incorporation. Since Coolidge’s reputation is synonymous with slapstick comedy, the announcement gave audiences the impression that A Minecraft Movie was going to be another movie made entirely of crude humor. 

With the recent release of the Borderlands movie met with being called “the worst movie of all time,” and the new trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog (also based on video games) being released, speculation swirls about the trend of video games becoming horrible films. Will the Minecraft movie follow suit? If it continues on the track it is currently on, then presumably, yes. However, the same could be said for the first trailer of the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. In this case, the initial trailer was met with such negative reception and so many internet memes that Colombia Pictures overhauled the movie and changed the style to be more cartoony, rather than attempting and failing to make animated realism look good. Now, some are suggesting that the Minecraft movie should get the “Sonic treatment,” implying that people should all collectively hate the trailer until changes are made. Audiences want the same flexibility from Warner Brothers in A Minecraft Movie that they got from Colombia Pictures in Sonic the Hedgehog. If Warner fails to comply, the internet will continue to give backlash to the movie, with many already vowing not to watch the movie if no changes are made.