Summary
A Minecraft Moviewas gargantuan at the box office on its opening weekend. The long-gestating video game adaptation outperformed every estimate several times over for a simple reason: its marketing spoke directly to a brand-new, younger generation of moviegoers. In doing so, the film found not only financial success at the box office, but also viral success online that has spurred even further buzz around it. Through these methods,A Minecraft Moviehas become an interactive cinema-going experience for a whole new generation. But is that a good thing?
Marketing a movie in 2025 is difficult for a litany of reasons, and perhaps no studio is more aware of that than Warner Bros., the company behindA Minecraft Movie. While the movie stands a real chance of becoming one of the highest-grossing films of the year, the studio’s other recent fare has not done so well. Recent big-budget artistic swings such asJoker: Folie à DeuxandMickey 17proved to be huge financial losses for Warner Bros. Meanwhile, upcoming releases such asSinnersandSupermanhave already been mired in pre-release financial conjecture.
There has been a lot of discussion about new offerings cinemas are looking to implement to lure audiences back into regular attendance in the coming months. However, there has been surprisingly little discussion about movie theaters' actual biggest competitor: social media.
When televisions became commonplace elements in homes around the country during the 1950s, the film industry responded by attempting to upscale and offer more than TV possibly could. This led to everything from 3D to Smell-o-vision, all in the name of convincing audiences to come spend their money on a night out rather than a night in. In recent years, the industry has grappled with similar issues, predominantly in the form of streaming. As streaming platforms have become more prolific and capable of delivering the same kinds of big-budget spectacles that the theatrical experience can, many audience members have questioned the validity of the theatrical experience altogether.
However, in conjunction with this is the fact that younger generations aren’t even watching streaming platforms as their primary form of at-home entertainment anymore; they’re simply online. Whether scrolling through social media, watching YouTube videos, orlivestreams of contentthey enjoy, younger generations have been inundated with short-form, attention-grabbing content from mobile devices for the majority of their lives. As such, they don’t have nearly as much of an appetite for long-form entertainment as the generations prior to them.
This is the end result of an entire generation of parents opting to give their child an iPad rather than encouraging imaginative play. Short-form, online content is what they’ve become familiar with, and it’s where theentertainers are who speak directly to them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the success ofA Minecraft Movie, whose marketing has catered to this audience and delivered them the equivalent of a live, interactive meme-filled reaction video.
A Minecraft Movie is Eventizing the Cinema For a Younger Generation
…Which is Good, Right?
Stories ran rampant over the weekend of young audiences reciting lines from the film and engaging in performative hijinks at key moments in the movie.A Minecraft Movie’s viral marketingencouraged audience members to engage with the film in person and online. It’s like a speed run ofThe Rocky Horror Picture Show’s marketing technique, but instead of waiting decades for a film to develop a cult following,A Minecraft Moviecuts straight to the audience being able to recite and enact key lines and moments upon initial viewing. By doing so, Warner Bros.' marketing team was able to evangelize the film among young audiences. The result seems to have surprised even the studio, as fans have turned out in droves to partake in this online trend. However, it begs the question: is this actually good for audiences or for theatrical exhibition itself?
It feels like a monkey’s paw scenario.Younger audiences need theatrical eventsthat speak directly to them to have the kinds of formative and defining in-theater experiences that incite joy and keep moviegoing alive. On the other hand,A Minecraft Movieis kind of bastardizing the very idea of what a theatrical moviegoing experience should be.
Movies have long interacted with their audience in one way or another, but that relationship has been noticeably amped up in the past few years. Movies likeAvengers: EndgameorSpider-Man: No Way Homecatered to the audience’s theatrical experience in almost slavish ways, with prolonged moments of silence designed to accommodate audience applause. It came at the cost of the quality of the films themselves.
To this end,A Minecraft Movieis a logical next step in audience-cinema relations, but it’s one that threatens to derail the entire experience. The viral marketing for the film hasproven an unequivocal success, one that was able to round up hordes of younger audience members and motivate them to go out to the theater. But if this is coming at the expense of everything that has long been held dear about the theater-going experience, is it really worth it?
