By Lucas Castillo ‘25
RAMSEY, NJ – With the release of A Minecraft Movie and its subsequent domination at the box office, a new ugly trend in Hollywood has made itself very apparent to me as of late. One which has plagued the adaptation space for years now, and which has been all the more successful in recent times. I’m referring to the practice of green lighting the production of a movie, or more accurately a cinematic pilot episode for an upcoming cinematic universe, for the sake of making an adaptation and making revenue, as opposed to making it for the sake of telling a good story. I will admit that this trend is nothing new, but I can’t really think of a better example of it than A Minecraft Movie. What’s more, because of this film’s overwhelming success, I fear that it has already stained the future of the next big movie genre that will shape the landscape of Hollywood as we know it; the video game movie genre.
Ever since the pandemic began, we’ve had a video game movie renaissance of sorts. From 2020 to 2024, we got the Sonic the Hedgehog movie trilogy; in 2023, we got both the Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNAF) movie and The Super Mario Bros Movie; and, finally, in 2025, we got A Minecraft Movie. All of these films have three things in common: they all respect their source material; they were all very profitable, considering each of their circumstances; and they each spawned future franchises. But one thing that they do not have in common, unfortunately, is their varying quality, with some of them being fairly atrocious. Particularly The Super Mario Bros Movie and A Minecraft Movie, with both ending up as a big old serving of empty slop that was clearly just made to appease or arouse fans and make money. Oh, and make money they did. The Super Mario Bros Movie is currently the highest grossing video game movie of all time, at $1,361,943,444 worldwide, and A Minecraft Movie is on track to match and/or beat it! And given that the slightly more substantive FNAF and Sonic movies didn’t make nearly as much money relative to the success of these two titans, then I fear that these two film franchises won’t be the model for the future.
I believe that video game movies are in a similar position now to that of comic book movies back in the early 2000’s. Comic book movies before then were very sparse and were commonly viewed as the laughing stock of the film space. Yet, during the early 2000’s, movies, and later franchises, like Blade, X-Men, Spider-Man, and even the Fantastic Four opened Hollywood up to the idea of cinematic adaptations of superheroes and comic stories and paved the way for the famous Marvel Cinematic Universe that took audiences by storm. Video game movies before the late 2010’s were in a very similar position to comic book movies pre-2000’s; yet, the emergence of these comic book films in the Hollywood zeitgeist was not marked by extremely faithful adaptations that were lacking in depth and storytelling promise, but rather was mostly marked by fairly loose adaptations that were rich in depth and storytelling promise – for the most part. Sorry, Fantastic Four! And it is because the precedent was set for good stories and movies to be told in the comic book movie space that we were able to get the decade-long miracle of storytelling that was the Infinity Saga. What do the video game movies of the future have to go by? Or, more accurately, what do the higher ups see as more successful? I don’t see Sonic The Hedgehog 3, easily the best video game movie of the past decade, making a billion dollars. No, just as in years past, the successes of the present will dictate what we get in the future. In which case, the future will be full of trite, lazy, and uninteresting crap disguised by a fresh coat of glossy, nostalgia-pandering paint.
But what if I told you that the executors and creators of A Minecraft Movie and The Super Mario Bros Movie are not the real culprits, the real killer of the future of cinema as we know it? No, the real killer is us. We the audience have perpetuated this new era of mediocrity by paying to go see movies that we all know are going to be bad. Unless we want to see more movies like A Minecraft Movie and fewer movies that prioritize quality in the space of video game movies and big budget films as a whole, then we need to start backing the right horses and use our money to encourage Hollywood executives to allow their creative teams to make compelling stories first and products second.