Why was Minecraft the most important movie of 2025?

This blockbuster film, based on a brick-and-mortar video game, took first place at the US box office — and with the chaos of Chicken Knight, its colorful presentations pointed to the future of cinema.

Oppenheimer is a cerebral drama in which Cillian Murphy plays the scientist who invented the atomic bomb. Minecraft is a film adaptation of the video game with Jack Black singing a song about “lava chickens”. But the two films have a lot in common. What’s clear is that they each grossed nearly $1 billion at the global box office: Minecraft is currently the highest-grossing film of 2025 in the United States, as well as the fourth-biggest film in the world, and Oppenheimer was the third-biggest film globally in 2023. But the other connection is that they both show how radically cinema has changed since the Covid-19 pandemic. Audiences engaged with both films in similar, culture-changing ways — which is why Minecraft is the most important cinematic release of the year.

Not that its success was a complete surprise. In 2024, the tenth largest film in the world was Sonic the Hedgehog 3, another video game adaptation. In 2023, the second biggest movie in the world – one place above Oppenheimer – was Super Mario Bros. Also in 2023, Five Nights at Freddy’s was so profitable that a sequel was released earlier this month, and next year we can look forward to Mortal Kombat 2, Street Fighter and Super Mario Bros Galaxy. Meanwhile, two of the most popular current TV series are The Last of Us and Fallout. Now that superhero movies are no longer as dominant as they were a few years ago, video games are Hollywood’s new favorite pieces of intellectual property.

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However, Minecraft was not a promising candidate for the big screen treatment. That’s not to say it’s not a cultural phenomenon: it’s the best-selling video game of all time, and brightly colored, right-angle-heavy merchandise is everywhere. But the truth is that it takes place in a world consisting entirely of dotted blocks representing different minerals, and the player’s task is to break or “extract” these blocks in order to build things. Entrusting this strange game to Jared Hess, director of such outlandish comedies as Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, doesn’t seem like the obvious way to sell more movie tickets than the most recent entries in the Mission: Impossible and Jurassic World series. Then came the reviews. Minecraft scored 48% on Rotten Tomatoes, the review aggregation site, with the typical rating being that it was “a garish, headache-inducing commercial… a sleazy commercial,” as Kevin Maher said in his one-star review for The Times.

The insolence you caused

The fans did not agree. The film performed super well in its opening weekend in April, with a BBC News report noting that it was enjoyed by children and adults alike. “When parents like a family movie, that’s a good thing,” Steve Buck, chief strategy officer at industry analyst firm EntTelligence, told Reuters. But the unusual aspect was that viewers weren’t just laughing at Black’s antics in a blocky alternate world called the Overworld. They were joining her. Primed by the trailers, especially the way Black announced each phrase with manic enthusiasm, fans of the game screamed whenever they recognized a line or meme, threw popcorn in the air, and generally acted like they were at a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The main rabble-rousing moment, inspired by a rarely seen character from the game, was when a green-skinned zombie kid jumped on the back of a chicken (which actually looked more like a duck) and warned Black, “Chicken Knight!” Minecraft fans are going wild. Some moviegoers in Utah even brought their own live chickens to the screening. At some American shows, the police were reportedly called.