By Joseph Hammann, Staff Writer

On Sept. 4 Warner Bros. Pictures released the teaser trailer for A Minecraft Movie, which stars Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Emma Myers and Danielle Brooks. The official release date for the movie is April 4, 2025, over 11 years after the project’s original pitch. The teaser has gained a large barrage of negative media attention due to its design choices and live-action characters in a cubic CGI environment.

According to Warner Bros., the film directed by Jared Hess follows four misfits who are pulled through a portal into the Minecraft Overworld. In order to find their way back to the real world, they must learn to survive in the Minecraft world and defend it from monsters inhabiting it. In the process, they meet Steve, an unexpected master crafter and together, they must all band together to find their way back to the real world. 

The trailer received backlash due to its appearance of mixing the animated Minecraft world with live-action actors and the design choices made on the creatures. This is not the first time a movie based on a video game has experience this paradigm, as Paramount got similar backlash when they released the initial trailer for Sonic The Hedgehog. Many viewers also compared the Minecraft trailer to Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle in how their concepts lacked originality and overall seemed unfaithful to their original source material. 

Other negative responses speak about the laziness of the Steve character just being Jack Black in a light blue shirt and calling the trailer a “funny prank” or an “early April Fools joke.” Other commenters began making Minecraft-related jokes with comments such as “This project should go back to the Crafting Table.” The teaser on youtube has accumulated approximately 581,000 likes and over 1.1 million dislikes.

However, not all of the responses of the teaser trailer have been negative. Minecraft’s creator, Markus “Notch” Persson, praised the trailer on X by saying “Ok I’m in. Wow this is a weird feeling.”

Consequently, some of the scenes from the trailer, such as the pink sheep and Jack Black saying “I… am Steve” have become popular internet memes. Various popular Minecraft YouTubers have also expressed their thoughts on the teaser, such as Stampylongnose and CaptainSparklez.

 Stampylongnose said that although it nails the blocky aesthetic of Minecraft, there isn’t much about the trailer that screams “Minecraft.” He was not a fan of adding the live actors into the Minecraft world and he would have preferred an animated approach instead. 

CaptainSparklez showed skepticism with the design of the creatures and how they interact with the environment. He also talked with former director Rob McElhenney on the project but said that he himself, like Stampylongnose, is not part of it.