It’s currently the talk of Hollywood, the fact that A Minecraft Movie doubled its early estimates and just became the highest grossing video game movies ever, passing Super Mario Bros. with a stunning $301 million opening weekend. This is Super Mario Bros, a film that went on to make $1.3 billion at the global box office.
How did analysts miss this? Because of a dramatic underestimation of the Minecraft brand among a younger crowd, which didn’t just go see the movie, but demanded to go see it, and no doubt some may go multiple times.
Minecraft is the best-selling video game ever made, 300 million copies sold to match the $300 million dollars it just earned. It has shaped multiple generations of gaming kids which is, of course, almost all kids, so when an adaptation like this hits, even if it looks awful to the rest of us, that simply does not matter. The brand is ironclad.
One thing making the rounds are people filming in their theaters, recording kids clapping and cheering and shouting out meme lines during the film, which even if theaters may annoy some these days, is far from the average experience. But for these kids, that’s kind of a perfect experience. You can see some of this in action here:
And when credits rolled:
This is the passion the game evokes. You aren’t going to see kids yelling at Moana 2 like this. It’s a generational IP. There is no way that anyone should have thought this move would make less than $800 million at the box office, and to miss estimates by a full 50% knowing this was coming is almost industry malpractice.
Not everyone is thrilled. Most of the grown adults I’ve heard from who have seen the movie lament all the kids yelling, and many are calling it the worst movie of the year or even one of the worst movies they’ve ever seen. I don’t doubt that could be true, but again, it just does not matter at a certain point. This is not true for almost any other video game brand (Sonic got extremely lucky it was as good as it was) which can still produce huge bombs, but Mario? Minecraft? Probably Fortnite next? They’re immune to failure. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing play out before our eyes.
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