bBy y estimate, Minecraft is incredibly successful. As of December last year, the bestselling video games so far had 204 million active players each month. Since its first release in 2011, its revenue has exceeded $3 billion (£2.3 billion). Moreover, the player was always keen to demonstrate fandom outside the boundaries of the game itself. In 2021, YouTube calculated that videos related to the game (tutorials, walkthroughs, homages, parodys) were collectively displayed 1tn times. In short, it’s a phenomenon.

This is the strength of the emotions, almost everything is positive, and it was only a matter of time before someone tried to turn it into a movie. After all, you have a historically popular product and a very enthusiastic fanbase: what probably doesn’t work? After all, quite a lot. Last September, First trailer For the film, the title “Minecraft Movie” was released, and the response was instantly violent. “Minecraft fans ravaged by a ‘bad’ live action trailer” Read one heading the next day. Some were called It is “crime against humanity”; others “Soulless neon hatred.” Within 24 hours, the website GamingBible said “Curse of my eyes” and “Pure nightmare fuel”. Within three days of release, the trailer was voted down over 1m.

If you’re familiar with Minecraft, you probably understand why. Minecraft is a game with a very unique look. Everything is made of square blocks and comes with a muted palette. However, the trailer is incredibly flashy. Everything appears to be made of halibo, and even worse, the block has slightly rounded edges. What’s even worse is that there are humans among them. A high-pitched, sarcasm-looking person. Jason Momoa is in an overtly blonde wig and a hot pink leather jacket. In other words, it looks like a film made by people who don’t understand Minecraft.

“This is Jumanji, but it has Minnecraft skin,” the first response from an Argentine YouTuber. elvitt0ri0 Looking at the teaser. “Minecraft offers endless numbers of story possibilities. Still, they decided to go with the storyline “We go to another universe and learn about it.”

The response for Elvitt0ri0 was to create Movies about Minecraft (not present)a version of what a movie should look like. This trailer was created with the open source animation software blender used to create the flow that achieved the best animation features at this year’s Oscars. This is a fully animated trailer that retains the look of the original game and features characters that players can recognize. Below the video is a comment. “This is everything the Minecraft movie should have done, the game elements, the history, the community… it’s so perfect.”

And elvitt0ri0 is not alone. Since the official teaser went live, dozens, perhaps hundreds, and even hundreds of fan-made Minecraft trailers have been born online. Vicki Fernandez performs dark animation of the channel, I created one titled It’s a trailer for Minecraft Movie, but it’s actually good. Her video is explicitly modified, not reconsidering. Shot for Shot Remake, everything is animated in Minecraft style, where everything is more readily recognizable. And that’s a good thing. The comments below the video are now full of what it extracts.

“I think the film should have been animated, not live action,” Fernandez said in an email. “It looks very strange when you mix a character that looks like a CGI cube with a real human. The CGI characters look oddly realistic and creepy while maintaining the proportions of the cube. Overall, the film doesn’t have a compelling art style.”

What Elvitt0ri0 and Fernandes have in common is that they are first and foremost Minecraft fans. Fernandez began playing games in 2014 at the age of eight, and four years later he began making fan videos. Elvitt0ri0 began playing at the age of 11 and was swept straight away by surrounding YouTube content. “One thing fans have proven over and over is that Minecraft can act as an incredible platform for telling the story,” says Elvitt0ri0. “You can see not only animations, but the entire series and movies created within the game.”

Both YouTubers lament that this sense of history and gratitude appears to have been lost in the official film. But that’s probably what you’d expect. Because Warner Bros have been trying to remove Minecraft movies from the ground for over a decade. In 2014, when the studio first released the film, they hired Sean Levy to direct it. However, it fell, so Rob McElhenney intervened to take his place. When he left shortly afterwards, Peter Sollet, best known for his 2008 Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist, took his place. It was only in 2022 that Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess stepped in to direct the script from masterminds Chris Bowman and Havel Palmer, and the film found all of its films.

In fact, Hess cut out his work for him. Minecraft is a game without a traditional story. A sandbox game in which players enter procedurally generated scenery and do whatever they want. If they want to extract raw materials from the surroundings and craft tools, they can. If they want to start a fight against hostile creatures, they can. If they want to spend four days using the game to make huge chicken (as my 10-year-old did this week), it’s up to them.

The movie nods to this with the title – it’s a Not Minecraft Movie Because Minecraft movies are reductive to be so definitive. Still, Hess appears to be heading down an easy path, stuffing the bones of a Jumanji-style offering with sticky skin. Worse, Hess has a distinctive visual style (he is essentially a sarcastic haircut Wes Anderson). This does not mesh intuitively with the appearance of Minecraft.

And for certain types of fans, its appearance is not just the gospel, but in part it is the fans’ lead. For example, youtube costumes named with elements animation, lush animation, and absurdity Minecraft Spoofs It was such a success that they were hired by game developer Mojang to create official Minecraft videos. Minecraft was ultimately a feedback loop between the game and the people who played it, and the film had to reflect that.

But the story is that Hess basically stumbled around making a film. When another project he was working on for the legend fell, they asked him to pitch to Minecraft – and perhaps this lack of familiarity was shown. After all, Phil Lord and Chris Miller got in the way to reassure people that they had performed with Lego before making the rigo loyal 2014 The Lego film. When Aaron Holvas and Michael Jerenick were announced as directors of the 2023 Super Mario Bros film, they said Super Mario Bros was their main source of entertainment as a child.

This is the level of familiarity that fans have come to expect, and there is a habit of things being wrong every time the director tries to force himself on his beloved property. The first live-action Mario film collapsed when Bowser (a giant muscular turtle) was replaced by Dennis Hopper with a sparkling blazer. Paramount was forced to spend $5 million redesigned by Sonic the Hedgehog after appearing in the film trailer, all the little eyes and human teeth, and the scary audience. However, Minecraft is still a relatively new game. People like Fernandes and Elvitt0ri0 have played the game long enough to really understand it, but only in their early 20s. One day they will make a completely loyal Minecraft film that will satisfy their fans, but that hasn’t been for years.

But again, this is a Not Minecraft Movie Minecraft Movie. Warner Bros. may have done enough to prevent this from fully floping. There is a wall-to-wall promotion both in-game and in the real world, and there is also a second trailer that appears to be a bit faithful to the source material. However, hardcore followers may feel that it’s time for fans to be in charge of providing the big screen of the future. Element Animation Minecraft Film is exactly what my kids want to see, but perhaps the reins will be handed over to someone else with an innate understanding of the game. As Elvitt0ri0 says, films based on beloved things like Minecraft should be “the part of the actual love of fans by fans, not just by the Corpora Paw Paw products by large corporations.”