In quite possibly the most inevitable news of all time, a sequel to this year’s astonishingly successful A Minecraft Movie has been announced with director Jared Hess returning at the helm, and according to Deadline, a planned release date of July 23, 2027.
It’s fair to say that A Minecraft Movie was divisive. Critics by and large loathed it, but kids adored it on a colossal scale, catapulting it into multiple meme-driven frenzies. There was the thing about throwing popcorn, the Lava Chicken song, and a heartfelt tribute to a Minecraft YouTuber legend. It seemed to find that perfect spot of crowd-pleasing delight, while being close to impossible to defend on a critical level. (Although I maintain it spoke powerfully on toxic masculinity.)
A Minecraft Movie has made almost half a billion dollars in the U.S. alone over the last six months, making it the year’s biggest film—but only by a hair! It’s just under $200,000 ahead of Lilo & Stitch, although the pair are far, far in the lead domestically. Globally it’s sitting just shy of the big one billion bucks, this time beaten by Lilo & Stitch which has just crossed the line internationally. (Both are dwarfed by China’s Ne Zha 2, which has earned a whopping $1.9 billion.) Success like that cannot be left well alone, so a sequel was nigh inevitable.
While the cast has yet to be announced, presumably anyone from the first movie could pretty much name their fee at this point, and it’s hard to see how it could go ahead without Jack Black. IMDB is already listing Black and Jason Momoa, although I’ve yet to see that officially confirmed. Jared Helm and Chris Galletta are both back writing the script, although all details are currently secret. (As in, I don’t imagine anyone’s written anything down yet.) Given how few biomes the first movie explored, and that it didn’t even mention The End, there’s obviously scope for the Ender Dragon story most people were expecting from the original.
My wish, that will not be fulfilled ever, is for a sequel set in the world of the fantastic early scenes of A Minecraft Movie, the Lemony Snicket-like story of the two orphaned children in an exaggeratedly peculiar version of our world. Remember the plot about the kid causing the giant ball to roll into the chip factory? It’s unlikely most people did by the time the movie ended, but damn, it was good stuff. That kind of hyper-reality filmmaking is what Hess was once so good at, back in his Napoleon Dynamite days.
