‘A Minecraft movie’ shows that Hollywood is still obsessed with franchises. And the situation will not change
The rather stimulating trailers of ‘A Minecraft movie’ (the first one accumulated on YouTube more than one million dislikes) do not guarantee that the film is a failure. Estimates around it from surveys, presales and tickets already bought facing the weekend predict a good result. But triumph or not, ‘Minecraft’s film’ is a good example of one of the big hollywood problems.
A Basel for the box office. The first quarter of the year has been terrible: films like ‘Snow White’ or ‘Mickey 17’ have punctured at the box office despite their high expectations, so the looks are now oriented to Warner and this ‘a Minecraft movie’. The projections are generous: there is talk of between 65 and 70 million collection, 140 at the international level, which would be an excellent start for the film and a respite for the Hollywood box office, matching success premieres such as ‘Dune: Part two’, released now a year ago.
The reef of video game adaptations. Although for a time they considered themselves bad business because of the difficulties of transferring the proposals of video game as ‘Street Fighter’, ‘Double Dragon’ or ‘Super Mario Bros.’, the adaptations have shaken the curse thanks to indisputable box office bombings such as ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ or ‘Super Mario Bros.: The film’. Until an openly lower proposal as ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ paid off so positively that this year its sequel is released.
Other influences. ‘The Minecraft ‘film manages other clear influences: on the one hand’ La Lego Movie ‘and its sequels also produced by Warner, and that are based on the analog construction game, of course, but especially in the great video games also gestated by Warner and that, in some way, have much to do in spirit with’ Minecraft ‘. And in addition, with one of Jack Black’s recent box office successes, the two deliveries of ‘Jumanji’ starring The Rock, and that closing the circle, are based on a film of the nineties that dealt with a board game without real counterpart but whose rules and development had much to do with the philosophy of video games.
Difficult to adapt. The amazing thing about this particular IP is that Minecraft, like all retro spirit games (although it is not materially), it is very difficult to adapt. Not only because of its very unmatched graphics, but by mechanics that touch abstraction and, above all, its lack of history, placing themselves on the opposite side of games like ‘The Last of Us’. In ‘Minecraft’ each player and each game are unique, and generate an argument around that runs the risk of alienating those who have lived radically different experiences with “their” game.
Hollywood has solved these types of problems generating a Lore that sometimes goes well (‘Super Mario Bros. the movie’) and sometimes it goes wrong (‘Street Fighter’). And if the problem is abstraction, as in ‘Doom’, leaving the tangent with results not always estimated.
Everything is an IP. There is nothing more to see all the films mentioned so far to see that Authentic juggles with formulas and names that have been successful in previous films, agitated in a seemingly infallible formula (the most popular video game of all time, blockbusters and even some commercial subtlety that can escape the little warned, such as the presence of Emma Myers, co -star of a success among the youngest public, such as ‘Wednesday’).
The Hollywood game. The advantages for the continuous use of IPS cinema are obvious: risks are reduced when dealing with stories and characters that have already been tested and accepted by the public; Success precedents such as Marvel or ‘Star Wars’ incline the balance in favor of franchises; and IPS allow extra income with a corporate approach that comes from merchandising and licenses. An almost safe bet that, of course, is sometimes encountered as the recent ‘borderlands’ or the chopped fall of originality and risk, but they are still anecdotes in the face of reality: the 10 most viewed films in 2024 were all sequels, remakes or franchises.
The numbers sing. Hollywood has turned in the last 15 years in productions of this type and if movies such as ‘Minecraft’ continue to find a box office hole, nothing will make the situation change. 30 of the most viewed films in streaming in 2024, according to Nielsen, were based on pre-existing material. Of the 66 films that exceeded 100 million collection in the last three years, 47 were from a franchise. And so on to infinity: the strangeness with these figures is not that there are films like ‘Minecraft’. The strange thing, knowing how money likes in Hollywood, is that not all of them.
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