[COLUMN] What Hollywood Should Learn from A Minecraft Movie | by Darren Mooney

A Minecraft Movie is a massive success, no matter how anyone cuts it.

In its opening weekend, it grossed $165m domestically and $313m globally. This makes it the biggest opening weekend since Deadpool & Wolverine and the biggest opening weekend of a video game adaptation ever. It seems likely that A Minecraft Movie will gross over a billion dollars. Its success is a welcome reprieve for the troubled studio Warner Bros. and for theatrical distribution as a whole, which has had a rough quarter. A Minecraft Movie may be more valuable to Warners than Superman.

The success of A Minecraft Movie caught Hollywood by surprise. Early forecasting predicted that the film would open to a more modest $65m, although that number was revised upwards as the weekend approached. As ever, there has been a rush to extrapolate some meaning or trend from the film’s success, as Hollywood tries to reverse engineer the box office bonanza into a sustainable business model.

The first impulse was to understand the success of A Minecraft Movie as part of a larger trend with The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Five Nights at Freddy’s as proof that video games were the new comic books, an untapped vein of intellectual property that could be harnessed and exploited. There were rumors (quickly dispelled) that Hollywood was looking at a Fortnite movie. Michael Sarnoski was announced as director of the Death Stranding adaptation.

There is undoubtedly some validity to this. It feels oddly appropriate that A Minecraft Movie released the weekend before the launch of the second season of The Last of Us, just as The Super Mario Bros. Movie came out a month after the first season finale of The Last of Us. There is a reservoir of established intellectual property just waiting for adaptation, with a hungry audience eager to see these brands adapted into theatrical events.

However, this is a symptom rather than an underlying cause. A Minecraft Movie did not succeed specifically because it was a video game adaptation. It succeeded because it offered a young and enthusiastic audience something that mattered to them. It presented younger cinemagoers with a brand that they recognized on their own terms, instead of trying to placate them by handing them down an older generation’s leftovers.

Recent years have seen once-reliable brands floundering at the box office. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is still the most successful franchise in the history of cinema, but its latest releases like The Marvels and Captain America: Brave New World have struggled to connect with audiences. Star Wars has transitioned from a license to print money at the box office to a direct-to-streaming franchise that is now clumsily trying to claw its way back to theatres.

There are all sorts of conspiracy theories about why these franchises are failing, often inventing boogeymen that happen to conform to the analyst’s existing worldview. In truth, it’s hard to argue that The Marvels is significantly worse than Captain Marvel, a movie that made a billion dollars in 2019. Any argument about the financial success or failure of a movie rooted in its quality feels misguided. If nothing else, the success of A Minecraft Movie demonstrates that quality is academic.

The truth of the matter seems rather more basic. The prime cinemagoing audience is younger than the general population, with studies suggesting that half of the visits are made by people between 14 and 34. Indeed, the pandemic seems to have accelerated that trend, with audiences from 2 to 39 significantly increasing their share of the theatrical audience. Even setting aside the statistical evidence backing in up this observation, it just makes sense.

Moviegoing requires disposable income and free time. As people grow up, as they have increasing social and economic obligations, from raising a family to paying a mortgage, it is a lot harder to justify and organize a trip to the cinema – particularly as a group activity. Those older audiences might go once or twice a year for a special occasion like Top Gun: Maverick or Avatar: The Way of Water, but are they going to turn out for the three Marvel Studios movies on the docket?

This lens provides a framework for understanding the state of modern theatrical franchising. In many ways, the ideal window to cash in on audience nostalgia runs between ten to fifteen years. So a couple that went on their first date to see Iron Man, Thor or Captain America: The First Avenger was in prime position to come back to say farewell to those characters in Avengers: Endgame, but any effort to ask them to stay on past that point for Eternals or The Marvels was a risky proposition.

Spider-Man: No Way Home was just on the cusp of that nostalgic window for the end of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies and Mark Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man duology. Deadpool & Wolverine could similarly resonate with the audience’s fond memories of the Fox X-Men franchise, in much the same way that Inside Out 2 was perfectly positioned to cash-in on the spending power of a generation that watched Inside Out as children.

This is why so many of the more successful “live action” remakes of Disney cartoons are films like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin or The Lion King. Those were childhood staples of audiences at the upper end of that cinemagoing demographic, and so are primed to want to revisit those properties theatrically. In contrast, many of the remakes that failed financially – such as Pete’s Dragon or Snow White – simply don’t exist in the cultural memory of the audiences that are going to cinemas.

This is why Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny struggled to connect with audiences. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) means a lot to a certain generation of cinemagoer. That generation did show up, but not in significant enough numbers. (58% of the audience was over 35.) However, the time to cash in on that nostalgia elapsed with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a film released two decades after the initial trilogy and rode that audience’s attachment to the character to over $750m.

This makes sense. Why would younger audiences want hand-me-down franchises from their parents and older siblings? This has always been a reality of generational shift. What is cool and appealing to one generation does not necessarily linearly transfer to the next. In many cases, each generation reacts against the previous one. The clean studio productions of the 1960s gave way to the rough-and-ready New Hollywood of the 1970s, which made room for the polished franchises of the 1980s.

It makes sense that many of these newer franchises originate in video games, as younger audiences have more experience in video games. Studies suggest that 85% of teenagers play video games, with about 40% playing daily. These are the brands with which this audience is familiar, and so it is just good business sense for the studios to meet this audience where they are. However, the same logic explains the success of the “#GentleMinions” trend a few years back.

Minecraft launched in 2011, fourteen years ago, which is the perfect window for this sort of cash-in. The audience reaction videos for A Minecraft Movie aren’t packed with kids, they’re stuffed with teenagers and young adults, reacting in an even more extreme manner than the viral reaction videos for Endgame or No Way Home a few years ago. This is nothing new or strange. It’s just an extrapolation of existing trends, passed down to a younger audience.

These franchises don’t even need to be new per se. They simply need to be new to the audience. The Super Mario Bros. Movie was not the first theatrical adaptation of the property, but it was the first in this new generation’s lifetime and did not rely on nostalgia for a film released before much of its audience was born. Barbie was a theatrical adaptation of a decades-old brand, but it was also the first theatrical live action movie starring the character. These movies belonged to the kids.

This should not be news. This should be common sense. However, it speaks to the larger issues with contemporary pop culture that the success of A Minecraft Movie came as such a shock to observers. Far too many modern brands are trapped in their own past, beholden to older fans rather than trying to attract a new audience. This nostalgia is slowly suffocating once-iconic and -vital brands, leading to dead-end creative decisions that undermine any long-term viability.

When Star Wars tried to win over younger viewers, it did so with Skeleton Crew, a show consciously harking back to the Amblin movies of the 1980s. Skeleton Crew was aimed at kids who were 12 in 1986, so it wasn’t a surprise that audiences failed to be won over. The only current live action Star Trek series in Strange New Worlds, a revival based on a rejected television pilot for 1964. Marvel Studios are sidelining their younger cast for the return of Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans.

Why would younger audiences be excited by any of that? The problem is arguably rooted even deeper in the production process. Hollywood itself is getting old. The major studios are overseen by older executives, failing to make room for young and dynamic producers who might be able to introduce some fresher concepts. Hollywood has stopped producing new movie stars, meaning that the only movie stars available for younger audiences are Tom Cruise or Leonardo DiCaprio.

The biggest lesson to take from the success of A Minecraft Movie might be that Hollywood needs to start making movies that are designed to entice younger moviegoers to cinemas, to trust their taste and their nostalgia over that of the older audiences who have aged out of cinema attendance. There’s an entirely new generation just waiting to have their nostalgia mined.