The Minecraft Movie: Printing Money or Risky Business?

[Music] All right, so let's go into the first story, which is Minecraft. So, hang with me. There's a bunch I want to update you on because this is actually some this is actually big news. And if you're like me, this really wasn't in my my social media feed, but it apparently was in every teen and tween social media feed. So according to Variety, the film earned 163 million domestically and 313 globally, making it the biggest debut of 2025 for all movies. All movies. So it is now the biggest movie release of the year. And so it is also the biggest video game adaptation opening in box office history. It beat Mario. So Mario, which launched in April of 2023, so two years ago. I can't even believe that. So, the Super Mario movie was 146 million and so this is like surpassed it. So, April is going to be the new

video game movie month. Everybody watch out and just mark that on your calendar. So, going into the weekend, analysts had projected that Minecraft was going to hit 80 million. Instead, it it nearly doubled that figure. It's the third biggest opening for Warner Brothers of all time of all of their movies. And remember, one of those movies was Barbie. So, you got Barbie and you got Minecraft as two of Warner Brothers biggest movie releases of all times. Critics are mixed, you know, as expected. The audience gave it a B cinema score, four out of five stars in post track. It's a 48% on Rotten Tomatoes. I think if you're an adult, you you look at this and you just like, you know, you do a a palm slap on your head like what is this? So about 62% of the audience are under 25. 64% were under the age of 25. Shocking. Wow. Right. Like you know like this is not a movie for us. Dinosaurs awareness was off the charts according to the com

score. Comore is like one of those marketing agencies and I'm just pulling this in as a marketer because again like I didn't see a lot about this and you know we're in the video game industry. We are not the target and that's okay. Warner Brothers 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 again the studio behind Barbie. So it was McDonald's, Doritos, Oreos, Poppy Soda. I don't even know what Poppy soda is. Perhaps that's It's delicious. You're missing out. It's so good. Yeah. It has like probiotics in it. Really? Mhm. Healthy. Oh my. Okay. All right. Healthy soda. I'm a Dr. Pepper lover. So Oh, so I'm not familiar with Get rid of that stuff. Coffee. So much better for you. Says Laura, who's way vaping all the time. They should have partnered with a with a

vape company because of all the teens. Oh god, I can't believe I said that. So, and then there are the memes and the absolute attention to detail and nerd focus that the movie had. So, let me explain chicken jockey. So, it's a thing. So, if you are familiar with the game, this is actually something that happens in the game, but it's extremely extremely rare to get like the little baby zombie to show up on top of one of the chickens. And so, in the movie, Jack Black shouts this out. And so, what's happening is all of the kids in the audience, whenever a meme like this happens, they go nuts. They throw popcorn. They yell and they scream. And in many cases, like the police are getting called in because everyone's kind of they're having a good time, but they're like making a huge mess. This is the why I'm referencing Rocky Horror Picture Show is it is now going to the movie is an interactive experience for kids and tweets. So, this is actually

why we're probably going to see I don't know if you guys remember Titanic back in the day where teens like kept going and going to the theaters. They're going to keep going. So, this is why the numbers are up there so far. So, my take and my message, dear Stumble Guys, dear Brawl Stars, Subway Surfers, Hill Climb Racers, if you don't have a movie in development right now, you're going to be missing out. Any game that has a large teen audience has the opportunity to capitalize on this moment. I am sure any movie studio, especially Warner Brothers, is going to take your call and will likely option you for millions and millions of dollars. Go find an agent and get your movie made and get it made for April of next year. That that is my message. AI do AI will do that movie if it's so fast. AI can probably in fact like Laura, isn't one of your favorites coming to theaters soon? Think about Zelda. Yeah.

Oh my gosh. I can't. Yeah. So, well, soon is a relative term, but with the liveaction Legend of Zelda supposed to be coming in 2027. Oh, wait. We waits to wait. But I was trying to think like what my takes for this cuz I haven't seen the movie. To be honest, I felt a little ashamed saying this and you're like you're saying, "Jen, it's not on my my social media feeds." I'm like, "It's all over mine." So, clearly they think I'm like Gen Z. But that aside, I was like kind of combing through all these list of franchises and I had the weirdest thought. I was like, you know what they should do? They should do like a Love is Blind or Real World. And then I was like, Animal Crossing characters. Like that's like the best mashup I could possibly think of. So Love is Blind meets Animal Crossing. Yeah, why not? Or Real World. Stick him in a house. Hold on. I haven't watched Love is Blind. Is that the one where you're dating somebody without not seeing them and then you have to like go on a holiday with that somebody if I love in the pods? Well, you get to see them before the holiday. So, you have to

propose, you have to commit to getting married and then you get to go on holiday with them because I remember this. My wife was explaining this and I'm like, "And you watch this?" And then I figured this thing out accidentally in a client dinner and all these like very senior women like one of them was CEO and they all watched like really really bad shows and I'm like why? And they're like well this is not even escape. It's like I need to rest my mind. I have a I have a challenging work and it's busy times and I watch absolute horseshit and like sometimes they're like even when I'm flying like this marketing VP, she's like people probably think that I'm cuz like when I'm flying and the type of that I'm watching they're like who's this crazy lady? She's like no but I need to kind of like unwind like this is my way of watching this utter garbage. Like my wife, she's she's a pretty smart lady and she watches like she's on a Swedish version of a Love Island or whatever love. She's like on the bottom of the barrel. She's gone through the UK, the US. She's like,

"Go Sweden. What do you got?" Yeah, she has watched every single version of Love is Blind and she What's actually interesting, it's actually a bit educational because culturally the cultures are so different in how they date like the Japanese version and how they Anyway, I actually don't watch a lot of those shows. I watch shows people dress up in costumes and are mean to each other. Like I like Handmaid's I was watching the, you know, season premiere of Handsmaid's Tale last night. Like that's like for me I can't wait for you know death and destruction and dystopian futures. I had a question about this is like why do we think their estimates are so poor? Like I do feel like in general we're kind of bad at estimating Gen Z's interactions with things. I feel and I this is kind of just like a reminder that like I mean off being off by this much means like what research were you doing or like well I don't understand. No, it's a fair point. The movie got a lot of really really bad reviews when

the trailers were coming out and and so that's why I think it happened. I remember we covered it actually I covered it that the trailers were like looked looked really awful and I think that's where they were leaning from. But what's funny is as adults like we don't understand that what we feel is awful is amazing. Like Skibbidity Toilet, right? Like I don't know if you guys know what that is. Or Roblox. Yeah. like, you know, any of the things that we think are cringe or awful, they're like, "Yes, you know," and so to me, you're right. Like, we don't have a good handle on how to estimate that. Yeah, I think that's the weird part. It's like, I agree. Like, I mean, when I saw the trailers, like, and this was not in my feeds at all. Like, I didn't even know it was coming. The only reason why I knew it existed is cuz my sister has three kids and they went and saw it. But, yeah, then it it pops off like this. And I noticed myself when forecasting on games is like when you try to forecast for like Jim Z behavior because Historically, we have just always been forecasting for essentially millennials.

Like forecasting for Gen Z is a relatively new thing. We're terrible at it. Everything I've seen is like we are so bad at estimating Gen Z. And I'm wondering like there's got to be some data point or some information that we as either millennials or older who are doing these types of forecasting don't yet realize as an indicator. Ironically, Adam brought this up last week. See, I'm I'm supposed to I'm his replacement. Perfect. Yeah. You're you're you're filling you're filling the seat perfectly. And you know we were talking about was it Enzoy or is it two weeks ago we were talking about Enzoy and like what are the social media KPIs from a marketing perspective that we should be looking at that actually mean something and I think that we're all trying to figure that out and you know is it more engagement metrics in social not just you know old school likes you know likes and subscribes but getting down into shares or time spent or some of these other KPIs to make again make a prediction or recommendation. A company needs to go figure that out. And how can you use AI to scrape, you know, social

and the internet to find those like holy grail metrics? You know, game discover code tries to do it with some of their metrics. I think we just we're just not quite there yet. Do you think Roblox the TV show is already in production for Amazon? Well, so the problem with Roblox is there is no Roblox. It's a platform. It's a platform. Hollywood can make Roblox. They don't worry about Oh, they will. Don't last couple executives. There definitely is a Roblox. Well, I I do think it's it's a larger challenge than converting Minecraft. Minecraft at least has characters already baked in. They don't have there's no narrative. There's no story, so they have to create a plot, but the characters already exist and they have little bits of personality. I would say with Roblox, you got to create everything from scratch. You don't really have much. You have the worlds, but there's nothing else in it. And there's not there's no characters that are going to be pushing plots forward or developing over time or creating some sort of emotional attachment like from the audience. So Roblox I think would be more of a challenge. Yeah. Like the

narrative of a Roblox movie I feel like would be more from the players perspective rather than in world. There is no Steve of Roblox, you know, like that doesn't at least I don't maybe I could be wrong. Roblox Steve. Yeah. We have to invinc Yeah. So, it's like, is Steve the player and then the player is, you know, going into these different worlds within Roblox or something? I don't know. I'm feeling Robert Downey is going to get a call and that movie is going to be made. He's going to get money. Yeah, he can play any character, the best good guy or the best villain. Well, we'll see. Just Just pay the man. [Music]