Long Range Forecast: A MINECRAFT MOVIE Aims for Blockbuster Numbers to Kick Off April

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Long Range Forecast — April 4, 2025

A Minecraft Movie | Warner Bros.

Domestic Opening Weekend Range: $55M – $75M

The immensely popular Minecraft video game franchise finds it way to the big screen this April with A Minecraft Movie, directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre) and starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa. The pair are strong presences, and the movie’s fish-out-of water concept (people from the normal world accidentally get into the Minecraft world, have to save it from destruction) allows them to lean into their comedic talents, much as Black did in 2017’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (36.1M domestic opening, $404.5M domestic total) and 2019’s Jumanji: The Next Level ($59.2M domestic opening, $320.3M domestic total).

The video game film adaptation, at one point a seemingly impossible nut to crack, has seen a definite upswing over the last handful of years as studios began to lean into the nostalgia factor and cross-generational appeal of some of the medium’s most classic properties. Of the top ten highest-grossing video game adaptations, the top seven are from 2019 or later, with 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie ($146.3M domestic opening, $574.9M domestic total) earning its place at the top of the list after only five days in cinemas.

Two years (plus one day) after The Super Mario Bros. Movie opened domestically, A Minecraft Movie vies for its place in the video game movie top ten. In addition to from The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the first weekend of April served well for 2022 release Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ($190.8 domestic total), which had the highest opening of the Sonic film franchise to-date with $72.1M. Our forecasting panel predicts that A Minecraft Movie‘s opening weekend will fall somewhere between Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and, on the lower end, 2019’s Pokémon: Detective Pikachu ($54.3M domestic opening, $144.1M domestic total), which like A Minecraft Movie was distributed by Warner Bros.

In terms of getting butts in seats, A Minecraft Movie presents some challenges that the Super Mario, Sonic, and Pokémon movies didn’t really have to deal with. As a “sandbox game,” Minecraft encourages its users to explore and create rather than leading them through a series of pre-determined plots, meaning the screenwriters didn’t have already-established story elements (like dueling in Pokémon) or a familiar roster of characters (it’s-a me, Mario!) to pull from. Minecraft is also on the newer side compared to its video game movie brethren. Between them, the Super Mario Bros., Sonic, and Pokémon franchises have a combined 103 years of lore for movies to pull from (and nostalgic fans to cater to), whereas Minecraft has only been around since 2011.

As an adaptation of a then-relatively recent popular game, the best point of comparison for A Minecraft Movie is 2016’s The Angry Birds Movie ($38.1M domestic opening, $107.5M domestic total), which came out seven years after the debut of the game it’s based on (compared to Minecraft‘s 14). But Minecraft has a clearer box office runway. It has to compete with holdover traffic from the previous month’s release of a classic Disney reimagining (Disney’s Snow White) and an MCU title (Captain America: Brave New World), just as The Angry Birds Movie was up against chase weeks for The Jungle Book and Captain America: Civil War. However, The Angry Birds Movie had to compete with the three other family-targeted wide releases (Alice Through the Looking Glass, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Finding Dory) and one video game adaptation (Warcraft) that came out over the subsequent four weeks, whereas the month after A Minecraft Movie‘s release sees only A24’s The Legend of Ochi gunning for the family audience.

Top 10 Highest-Grossing Video Game Adaptations, Domestic

Tracking Updates [as of March 7]