How Minecraft became a cultural phenomenon bound for Hollywood

It seems remarkable that it has taken this long for A Minecraft Movie to arrive in cinemas. It has been more than 15 years since Swedish game company Mojang Studios first unleashed the block-building game on the world and a decade since they sold it to Microsoft for $2.5bn (£1.9bn). Last year, the game had 170 million monthly active players — more people than live in Russia.

Minecraft is a deceptively simple game with no set goal. Players can mine blocks from the theoretically infinite world of the game and use those blocks in order to build whatever they want. In the basic "survival mode", players have to keep their character alive by staving off hunger and fighting monsters, while there's also a "creative mode" to allow more elaborate, stakes-free building.

Markus Persson, usually known as Notch, created Minecraft in 2009, having previously worked on browser games for King — which would later become enormous when it released Candy Crush Saga. Its name came from a user suggestion during its alpha testing phase, during which the game was already getting a tonne of positive word of mouth.

Reviewers spoke of the game as being something very special, while the popular webcomic Penny Arcade ran a series of strips about how addictive Minecraft was. In the nerdy world of video games, everyone had started talking about Minecraft and it had been sold one million times just a month after it entered its beta phase. Before its full release in 2011, it had 16 million registered users and 5,000 people attended the first MineCon event — held to mark Notch pulling the lever to release the game. Minecraft's pre-release success helped to popularise the idea of early access for games being used to drive sales.

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The simplicity of Minecraft, coupled with its capacity for creativity, allowed it to dovetail perfectly with the growing influence of YouTube, social media, and the "creator economy". By May 2012 — just six months after the full launch of the game — there were more than four million Minecraft videos on YouTube. If you were a part of the online gaming community at that time, Minecraft was simply unavoidable.

Minecraft's elasticity also allowed institutions to join the fray. It helped that Minecraft had clear educational applications, teaching creative skills as well as providing the chance to experiment with an accessible computer design program. UK institutions like the British Museum and Great Ormond Street Hospital have been recreated in Minecraft over the last decade.

This became the rarest of things in the video game world — something that was genuinely beloved by gamers of all ages, while also being deemed healthy and useful by those outside of the community. In that sense, it has certainly earned its place on any worthwhile list of the best video games ever made.

Unsurprisingly, Hollywood came calling pretty early in this rise. Notch revealed in 2014 that he was working with Warner Bros to help develop a film based in the world of the game. Shawn Levy signed on to direct, though he was soon replaced by actor — and football club owner — Rob McElhenney. This version of the film nailed down a 2019 release date and early production began, only for the project to fade away amid an executive shake-up at the studio.

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The COVID-19 pandemic further delayed any work on the Minecraft movie, booting it off its rearranged 2022 release date. The exact thing that catapulted Minecraft to success as a game – its sandbox concept and blank slate for creativity – made it difficult to transform into a film. In a world without plot, how do you craft a story worthy of a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster?

It wasn't until April 2022 that the current version of the film — directed by Napoleon Dynamite's Jared Hess — fired up. Hess had been invited to pitch for Minecraft after another project with the studio broke down. As he explained to The Salt Lake Tribune: "Trying to adapt something that doesn’t have a story — it’s an open sandbox game. … I like the challenge. There’s got to be a fun, ridiculous movie here. And there is."

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This is as close to a sure-thing as possible at the box office. Some estimates point to a potential $80m (£61m) opening weekend in the US alone, particularly on the back of decent buzz — albeit critics are split down the middle on it with a 52% Rotten Tomatoes score.

Ultimately, it seems totally inconceivable that A Minecraft Movie can be anything but an enormous success. And all of that is down to the work Notch did more than a decade ago, creating an incredibly simple — but highly addictive — video game that became revolutionary. The only surprise is that it took Hollywood so long to catch on to the Minecraft wave. After all, the building blocks were always there.

A Minecraft Movie is in UK cinemas from 4 April.