Two things immediately occurred to me when I saw the first teaser for A Minecraft Movie. First, I can't believe my supposed pals at PC Gamer made me write about this. And second, why is it called A Minecraft Movie? Why not The Minecraft Movie? It is, after all, the Minecraft movie.
It turns out there's actually a reason, and it even sort of makes sense. "We’re calling it ‘A Minecraft Movie’ because we’re respecting the fact that there’s no one story that drives the game," Legendary Entertainment's chairman of worldwide production Mary Parent told Variety.
Jared Hess, the director of A Minecraft Movie, concurred. "We’re not canonizing anything. We’re just one of a zillion stories."
Well... yeah, okay, I guess. It sounds like the sort of thing that gets cooked up after the fact to justify a dodgy decision, but it does fit with the narrative underpinnings of Minecraft, which are essentially non-existent: Even Steve, one of the most immediately recognizable characters in videogame history, was only given a name because of a joke that got out of hand. So if you imagine Minecraft as a sort of continuum of infinite universes, and this movie is just one of them, then yes: A Minecraft Movie makes at least a passable amount of sense.
That approach to Minecraft's non-canon extends to Jack Black, who portrays Steve in the film—but just one of many Steves. Mojang senior director of original content Torfi Frans Ólafsson said Black's character was originally a talking pig, and he didn't become Steve until "very, very, very late in the development," because the film "needed an expert and host." But Black, like the film itself, is not really Steve—he's a Steve.
"This is not my Steve or your Steve—this is Jack Black’s Steve," Ólafsson said. "A lot of fans responded when they saw the first teasers and trailers, like, 'Hey, wait a minute—this is just Jack Black. This isn’t Jack Black being someone else.' And maybe it is, because this is literally him interpreting this character and what it means to him."
One might argue that Jack Black plays Jack Black in pretty much everything he appears in, but apparently he took the role seriously: The Variety report says he went "full Method" on set, and when Ólafsson got Xbox consoles and set up private Minecraft servers for the cast and crew, Black "was just completely manic" with the game, putting more than 100 hours into it—not a lot by some measures, but quite a bit when you're supposed to be making a movie.
It will be very interesting indeed to see how all of this ultimately works out: PC Gamer's Morgan Park said A Minecraft Movie's villagers "look like what I imagine Hell is," which is generally not the sort of thing you want to see plastered across a movie poster, but Chris Livingston predicted "A Minecraft Movie will make A Trillion Dollars," although he also suggested that Warner could've accomplished the same thing for a lot less money "by just having Jack Black stream himself playing Minecraft and yelling item names." So, maybe not the most resounding endorsement ever.
A Minecraft Movie is set to debut in the US on April 4. Now if someone can just explain Jason Momoa's whole thing to me, we'll be all set.
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