“A Minecraft Movie” leveled up at the box office, collecting a blockbuster $157 million in its opening weekend. It’s not only the biggest domestic debut of the year but the best in history for a video game adaptation.
Heading into the weekend, Warner Bros. and Legendary’s PG fantasy comedy, starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa, was projected to take in $70 million to $80 million, with some bullish analysts suggesting a final number closer to $90 million.
Thanks to pent-up demand for a family film, broad appeal and goodwill toward the 2011 video game, however, “Minecraft” squashed expectations in the U.S. and abroad. At the international box office, the tentpole added $144 million for a global start of $301 million. The film cost $150 million to produce before global marketing expenses.
Prior to this weekend, Disney and Marvel’s “Captain America: Brave New World” ($88 million) held the benchmark for the year’s biggest opening while Universal and Illumination’s 2023 smash “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” ($146 million) boasted the largest start for a video game adaptation.
Jared Hess (“Napoleon Dynamite,” “Nacho Libre”) directed “A Minecraft Movie,” which follows a group of misfits who are pulled through a portal into a cubic world and guided by an expert crafter named Steve (Black). Reviews have been mixed (48% on Rotten Tomatoes), though that clearly didn’t have an influence on audience turnout.
“The film is drawing like a coveted five-quadrant movie, appealing broadly to everyone — younger and older adults, as well as young teens and kids,” says David A. Gross, who runs the FranchiseRe movie consulting firm. “Reviews are not good, but these pictures are made for moviegoers, not critics. When a release catches fire like this, it generates its own momentum and you can set aside all projections.”
Hollywood, and Warner Bros. in particular, was starved for a hit. Overall box office revenues continue to lag with ticket sales currently 5.3% behind 2024 and 35% behind 2019, according to Comscore, though “Minecraft” helped shrink that gap. And Warner Bros. is coming off the back-to-back theatrical misfires of Robert De Niro’s “The Alto Knights” and Bong Joon Ho and Robert Pattinson’s “Mickey 17.” Up next, the studio has “Sinners,” a $90 million R-rated vampire thriller from “Black Panther” and “Creed” collaborators Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan.
“The domestic box office has been asleep in 2025, and this is an overdue wakeup,” Gross says. “It’s good news for the industry, although this kind of volatility is not healthy in the long run. What the box office needs is consistency.”
“A Minecraft Movie” is based on one of the best-selling video games in history, but that kind of association doesn’t always guarantee success in Hollywood. (Just ask the backers of last year’s “Borderlands.”) However, game-based films have fielded more hits than misses of late with “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” “Sonic the Hedgehog” and Tom Holland’s “Uncharted” all scoring at the box office.
Legendary has struck gold in adapting major properties for the screen; “A Minecraft Movie” extends the production company’s streak of the Godzilla and King Kong franchise as well as “Dune,” and “Dune Part II.”
“When we make films, we all hope they will connect with the culture,” says Legendary Entertainment’s chair Mary Parent. “But when they do, they take on a life of their own. It’s like lighting dynamite.”
And Warner Bros. left no stone unturned in terms of getting “Minecraft” on the radar of moviegoers. The promotional campaign resulted in the largest third-party partnership in the company’s history (and that’s significant considering this is the studio behind “Barbie”). It worked with 45 brands, including McDonalds, Doritos, Oreo and Poppi Soda, to bring “A Minecraft Movie” to the masses.
“A perfectly crafted marketing and distribution plan by Warner Bros. put the film front and center with the target audience of kids and families,” says senior Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “In the wake of ‘Super Mario’ and ‘Sonic,’ this weekend’s global performance by ‘A Minecraft Movie’ proves the code has been officially cracked on how to turn a small-screen video game into a big-screen event.”
As “A Minecraft Movie” dominated at the box office, other films in theaters settled for scraps. In a far away, distant second place, Jason Statham’s action thriller “A Working Man” collected $7.2 million from 3,262 theaters. After two weeks of release, the Amazon MGM film has earned $27.7 million.
Fathom Entertainment’s “The Chosen: Last Supper – Part 2, a faith-based TV series about Jesus and his disciples, remained in third place with $6.7 from 2,235 cinemas over the weekend. Fathom Events is rolling out the show’s fifth season in cinemas with two-week runs of episodes; “Part 1” has grossed $17.3 million to date.
Disney’s live-action “Snow White,” starring Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, tumbled to fourth place with $6 million from 3,750 venues in its third outing. So far, the $250 million tentpole has generated a dismal $77 million domestically and $168 million worldwide. It’s shaping up to be one of the year’s biggest box office misfires (though, of course, 2025 is young).
Rounding out the top five is Universal and Blumhouse’s “The Woman in the Yard” with $4.5 million from 2,845 cinemas in its sophomore frame. The film, starring Danielle Deadwyler as the matriarch of a family who sees a strange woman (in the yard, of course), has grossed $17 million. Fortunately for its backers, “The Woman in the Yard” cost just $12 million to produce.
Also new to theaters this weekend, Neon’s horror comedy “Hell of a Summer” opened to $1.75 million from 1,255 screens. It’s not a bad start, considering the low-budget film was funded for $3 million. “Stranger Things” star Finn Wolfhard co-directed the film with Billy Bryk. They also both appear in the movie, which follows sleep-away camp counselors who get stalked by a masked killer. Initial ticket buyers were mostly females under 25, according to Neon.
From Variety US