A Minecraft Movie was a smash hit at the weekend, doubling expectations to take $157m at the U.S. box office. The haul surpasses The Super Mario Bros. Movie as the best opening weekend for a video game adaptation ever; only Avengers flicks had better April openings.
"Younger audiences love going to the movie theater, believe it or not," said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. "This is the perfect small screen to big screen alliance. It became a must-see theatrical event. Awareness was off the charts."
Video game adaptations have had some pivotal successes in recent years, including "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," the "Sonic" series and "Five Nights at Freddy's."
"Video games were once a genre that had very mixed results at the box office, but the code has finally been cracked," Dergarabedian said.
My 7-year-old loved it, and loved that the theater was packed with whoopin' and hollerin' teens exploding with joy at every last Minecraft meme that made it in. It's a perfect example of a film that adults assume from the first reveal is going to be terrible, and maybe in some objective sense is, but is really just pitched with scientific precision at an audience they're all too old to understand.
Hypothesis: neoliberalism was designed to prevent teenagers from doing anything except sit in their bedrooms looking at screens and consuming whatever was on them, but cheap electric scooters and whatnot have disrupted this and given them some unexpected freedom—e.g. a few million of them can now get to suburban theaters on a weekend without cars.
Previously:
• Minecraft is for the children
• Extremely mundane places in Minecraft
