Following some very tepid reviews and a year of angry internet men explaining how the film will definitely be a flop, A Minecraft Movie has smashed its opening weekend expectations, pulling in $157 million in the U.S. alone. With an estimated $300 million in ticket sales worldwide, it’s looking set to easily make a billion, and has likely already made its money back.
Reportedly costing $150m to make, and you can likely double that to include international marketing spend on a film of this scale, that means A Minecraft Movie is just making profit from this point on.
Based on pre-sales and expectations, as reported by Variety, the film was projected to bring in an impressive $70 to $80 million over the weekend, with “some bullish analysts suggesting a final number closer to $90 million.” So $157m is an incredible result. This makes it the biggest opening weekend for a movie so far this year, and significantly, makes it the highest-grossing start for any movie based on a game, beating The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s opening weekend take of $146 million.
Director Jared Hess is still best known for 2004's Napoleon Dynamite and 2006's Nacho Libre which, given he’s made four other full-length movies since, is a little damning. But he’ll be hot property again now, helming what’s likely to be the biggest kids’ film of the year. And that’s despite A Minecraft Movie’s reviews, which have been pretty harsh.
Currently sitting at 47 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 47 on Metacritic, critics have been negative about the movie. It’s absolutely not a great film, packed with weird pacing, Teflon characters (bar one), and abandoned plotlines (oh, and my son would add: “Where was the Ender Dragon?!”). But it’s a big, colorful bunch of funny jokes and recognizable references that caused all the kids in my earshot to cheer or comment in delight as they spotted them. Which is to say, it succeed at what it was always setting out to do.
With schools on or soon to be on vacation all over the world for Easter/Spring breaks, the movie could be set to have a long tail, rather than a sharp drop-off. Word of mouth probably won’t do it a huge amount of good, other than parents saying to each other, “It’s fine,” but the fact that the McDonald’s near me has lines blocking nearby roads because of the tie-in Happy Meals toys suggests it’s going to keep making money on the big screen.
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