A Minecraft Movie has earned $157 million, the most successful domestic opening weekend for a videogame adaptation ever

It comes as absolutely no surprise that A Minecraft Movie has done incredibly well at the box office. Even before it hit cinemas, Chris predicted that it would make a trillion dollars, and while he’s a little off the money, the film still did spectacularly well.

In its opening weekend, A Minecraft Movie made $301 million worldwide and $157 million domestically, the biggest opening weekend ever for a videogame adaptation. To put this in perspective, The Super Mario Bros. Movie was the former highest-grossing videogame movie, debuting with $146.4 million domestically over a three-day weekend.

Although The Super Mario Bros. Movie had a smaller budget of $100 million while A Minecraft Movie had $150 million, it doesn’t make this achievement any less impressive. This also means that after its debut weekend, there’s a decent chance that it is already profitable for Warner Bros. But like I said before, I saw this outcome from a mile away.

My first thought when I watched A Minecraft Movie was how it felt like it had been made in a lab to be marketable. It’s utterly vanilla (pardon the pun), the story is drama-free, there are no greater moral issues, and the cast has been swept clean of any controversy, at the expense of one comedy rock duo. It’s the perfect controversy-free kids’ movie.

It also had a pretty impressive marketing campaign. Everywhere I look, I see photos of the Minecraft McDonald’s meals or people talking about which little figure is the best collectable. And trying to win over fans of the game by just talking about how much lapis lazuli Jack Black mined whilst filming the blockbuster repeatedly obviously worked on some level.

But A Minecraft Movie has also managed to appeal to more than just kids. Despite clearly being made for those who grew up with TikTok, with Jack Black periodically yelling the names of Minecraft items and Jason Momoa’s entire performance being a sequence of six-second bits and jokes.

Talking to the producer and director, it was clear that everyone involved with making A Minecraft Movie was aware of just how difficult it was going to be to appeal to more than one target audience. To that end, director Jared Hess and producer Torfi Ólafssonon decided to try and have as much fun with making the film as possible, hoping that their love of the game would shine through for long-time players as well as for newer fans. “The key to it was to be fun,” Ólafssonon said. “To not take ourselves too seriously, but take the game very seriously.”

And fair play to them because they clearly hit the nail on the head when it came to the concept, marketing, and execution of A Minecraft Movie, seeing how well it’s done in its opening weekend. While I may not have absolutely loved A Minecraft Movie, which is reflected in my review, there’s no denying that this is exactly what the masses love: head-empty fun.