The first trailer for the official Minecraft film (starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa) has generated a surprisingly negative reaction on social media, with fans left stunned by the film’s visuals and tone.

The trailer for the highly anticipated feature film was met with much criticism; one commentator wrote: “I don’t understand the decision to have live-action actors in the Minecraft world, when Minecraft translates so incredibly well to animation. The green screen here is terrible.”

Another disappointed commentator wrote: “While I didn’t expect this to be anything great… I expected MUCH better than what is embarrassingly shown here. My goodness.”

It is difficult to estimate the popularity and influence of Minecraft—the 13-year-old game is a true cultural phenomenon, having sold more than 300 million copies worldwide.

Every parent knows that children today have an encyclopedic knowledge of Minecraftdown to the flora, fauna and countless building materials in the game.

On YouTube alone there are genres within genres of Minecraft videos ranging from simple gameplay to complex storylines, creative challenges and endless lore speculation; according to Mojang, the game’s content has been viewed over a trillion times on YouTube.

The game is essentially digital LEGO and offers scope for an extraordinary amount of creative expression, set to a beautiful, enchanting soundtrack that you can listen to for hours.

Gamers have refined, tweaked, and made the game unrecognizable, using it as a springboard to explore ideas and create hugely ambitious builds; Minecraft is an infinite sandbox, and its blocky objects and characters have become pop culture icons.

So why was the official Minecraft watched the movie trailer with so much disappointment?

The Negative Reactions to the ‘Minecraft’ Movie Trailer, Explained

There are numerous animated and live-action works inspired by Minecraftand many of them are exceptionally well made.

The pixelated world has been visualized by talented artists for years, but the official cinematic trailer presented a disappointingly bland image, which many compared to an AI-generated rendering.

The unsettling combination of live-action and CGI led some commentators to draw comparisons to sloppy green screens and hyper-realistic mock-ups of video game characters.

Many commentators compared the film to Jumanjiand some dismissed the appearance of Jack Black as Steve (the closest Minecraft has a leading actor) as well as bad casting.

In general it seems that the internet soured about Jack Black after he (temporarily) severed ties with his longtime creative partner Kyle Glass at Tenacious D, after Glass made a tasteless joke about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.

Some even made memes in which they used the images of the Minecraft movie based on the disastrous “ugly Sonic” design revealed in the first Sonic the hedgehog movie trailer, which was subsequently replaced with a cuter, more faithful design.

The Minecraft trailer presented a generic vision of a video game adaptation, in line with the aforementioned Sonic film (and the Mario Bros. movie, if we’re being honest).

However, there are so many unofficial stories within the Minecraft universe that have already been posted online; many of them are more immersive and better suited to the tone of the game than this trailer.

That being said, the Minecraft movie is absolutely going to be a billion dollar box office hit – no amount of bad reviews and sarcastic comments is going to stop the flood of kids that are luring weary parents into the theaters Minecraft on the big screen.

An online commentator on X (Twitter) put it best: to write: “looks terrible, we’ll keep an eye on it anyway.”

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