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When it comes to the massive $313M global opening of Warner Bros/Legendary’s A Minecraft Movie, success has many fathers.
Yet, there’s some major lessons here for rival studios in how Warner Bros, post Barbie, has been able to energize social media, and target digital ads, to create an unforeseen blockbuster. Warner Bros is in for 65% on the $150M production, and Legendary 25%.
Let’s start off with the obvious: everyone always complains about how tracking is off. On paper before Warner Bros’ last minute promo push late last week, Minecraft Movie looked a lot like a Sonic the Hedgehog movie (around $60M opening). We heard on Thursday that the movie had a shot at $75M+ after a pick-up in presales.
How did anyone miss the fact that it was going to do Super Mario Bros Movie-like business ($146M-plus)?
Only now in hindsight is everyone going, ‘Oh, yeah, duh, the Mojang game is huge at 300M copies sold and 140M monthly active players.’ However, what’s clear here is that there’s a disconnect between the general moviegoing audience polls and the laser-targeted audience that Warner Bros goes after (a testament to the studio’s marketing expertise to zero in on specific groups).
“That under 13 crowd is a very hard one for tracking to capture, and that’s who showed up” says one rival marketing maven, “Warners is very good at reaching an audience that tracking can’t.”
Some tracking firms are looking to up their game when it comes to precision focused subset tracking (i.e. accountants who might be interested in seeing Amazon MGM Studios’ The Accountant 2). CinemaScore reported that the under 18 crowd repped 36% of Minecraft‘s audience (who gave it an A). The under 25 set on CinemaScore showed up at 64% (giving Minecraft a B+).
The other big takeaway with Minecraft is how Warner Bros and Legendary were able to squash the negative reaction to the film’s first trailer in September and reverse the buzz narrative on the Jason Momoa-Jack Black pic. It’s a feat that mega blockbuster house Disney couldn’t quell in the poisonous sentiment faced by Snow White.
Says one promo insider connected to Minecraft, “In all fairness, we didn’t have cultural and political challenges to overcome, we just had a rabid fanbase to overcome.”
Minecraft fans feared that the movie was too live-action. They despised the look of the sheep. Warner Bros’ marketing team of Dana Nussbaum, Christian Davin and creative advertising John Stanford and Legendary’s Blair Rich listened to fans’ complaints and corrected course.
One of the major problems with the first trailer was that the pic’s VFX weren’t ready. The second trailer delivered, including vital moments from the game so that Minecraft fans knew that their game was in good hands. It’s not a coincidence that the second trailer beings “Minecraft trailer, take two” in a nod to the fans.
The second trailer only was 3% negative versus the first which was much higher.
Out in the ether, there was a word of mouth that Warners was possibly in trouble with Minecraft, that it was a bad movie (critics gave it 48% on Rotten Tomatoes). The reason for that stemmed from the fact that together with Legendary, they made a movie that was strictly for the fans with its wink to influencers from the game, and its babble language and one-liners which fans are jumping on their seats, and singing along to. Minecraft was never meant for joe moviegoer. Scroll down to see what fans are doing at McDonald’s drive-ins as they go after those Minecraft happy meals. We hear that test screenings of the film among kids and parents had significantly higher scores than general audiences. Even after that first negative trailer, fans were busting to get into test screenings.
However, don’t deny the power of the Minecraft social media influencers. If only Disney had followers such as that which could have reversed the pre-release narrative on Snow White triggered by Rachel Zegler’s comments and anti-Trump politics. Legendary invited Minecraft influencers to the set, gave them shoutouts in the movie, and invited 30 of them to the London world premiere. They also created content pre-release. “Warners put them up on a pedestal,” says another marketing insider close to the pic. This is a very similar strategy to Barbie where Warners months in advance gave fans the power to take the pic’s promo narrative in their hands (with both the Barbie logo memes on social, as well as the Barbenheimer fan-made images).
There were myriad marketing stunts including Cartoon Network’s Minecraft-related episodes of Adventure Time, Discovery’s and Minecraft co-promotion across Naked & Afraid, Gold Rush, etc;
Food Network’s Spring Baking Championship episode where contestants created “blockified” goods, and TNT Sports hosting a movie themed stunt during NBA All-Star Weekend with Kenny, Charles, Shaq, and Ernie bringing cubed basketballs and mugs to the broadcast desk. But nothing has hit gold better for Minecraft than the McDonald’s Happy Meals cross promo and fans’ craziness in ordering them, moments that have gone wildly viral.
Also, let’s not forget about the Steves taking over Times Square:
Lastly, props to the Jeff Goldstein led global distribution team who always believed in the first weekend of April, and how prized franchises like Fast & Furious have launched on that date.
Not Giving Up
The history of Minecraft spans 30 plus writers over 15 years, and several filmmakers including Shawn Levy, Rob McElhenny and Peter Sollett, before Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess, who was a fan of the game, became attached.
Going back to the beginning, producer Roy Lee and late producer Jill Messick (who is credited on the movie) went after the game’s rights at the same time. Messick flew over to Sweden to land them. They sold them to Greg Silverman, then at Warner Bros production, and Toby Emmerich. Warners couldn’t crack the project. Hence, Emmerich brought in Legendary’s Mary Parent and Cale Boyter who have a knack in understanding die-hard fan franchises like Dune and Godzilla, and making them sing. Before Emmerich’s exit, the option to the game were re-upped and talks with Jason Momoa commenced. Warner Bros President of Production Jesse Ehrman was the constant shepherd on Minecraft between the Emmerich led administration and the incoming Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy one. Legendary segued out Sollett and brought on Hess. Talk about a comeback for a director. The last major movie he directed was the orphaned Relativity Zach Galifianakis, Kristen Wigg, Jason Sudeikis and Owen Wilson comedy Masterminds. However, Legendary always believed in Hess as a filmmaker and were considering him for another project. Given his ability to stoke a cult via film, read his breakout 2004 movie Napoleon Dynamite, and the fact that he and his kids were fans of the game, it was an ideal match of IP and filmmaker.
During the course of its journey to the big screen, the release date for Minecraft shifted several times: first it was May 24, 2019, then March 4, 2022, before arriving on April 4, 2025 (that date set a year ago).
De Luca and Abdy get the credit for greenlighting the movie after their review of the previous administration’s projects; Lee lobbying Minecraft to the duo in one of his initial meetings with them.
What a difference a massive hit makes. In the week leading up to Minecraft‘s release, news leaked on Bloomberg that Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav was meeting with candidates to replace De Luca and Abdy, the duo having ambitiously rolled the dice on four $100M-plus original projects: Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 (which bombed at $127M WW), Ryan Coogler’s period genre pic Sinners (out April 18 Easter weekend), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Leonardo DiCaprio political action movie One Battle After Another (Sept 26) and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s punk rock monster movie The Bride (March 6, 2026) in an effort to bring more auteurs to the Burbank, CA lot post Christopher Nolan’s exit to Universal. That job search we hear from sources has cooled significantly following the best opening for a feature videogame adaptation here among other records.
“I credit Mike and Pam for this movie getting made,” says Lee, “The project was never getting made under the previous regime and was re-ignited by them.”
