The iconic video game, Minecraft, was released in 2011 and has continued to garner extreme popularity with generations of kids and adults, showcasing creativity with the sandbox-style gameplay. The premise of Minecraft is simple: a created character spawns in a randomly generated world, and has to use all the resources to survive using blocks, farming crops, fighting mobs, and ultimately defeating the ender dragon as the final achievement. Minecraft has two base characters, Alex and Steve, but players could also create a custom character to play as.
Mojang Studios finally announced in 2014 that the movie was in the works and took a little over a decade to be fully released. Those that were into the game started making their own renditions of movie trailers and movie concepts which started to spread around platforms like YouTube.
When the official trailers finally came out in November of 2024, people were surprised because the fan made trailers were often seen using the original blocky animation style whereas the official trailer was with hyper realistic CGI and real humans.
The original teaser, as of May 2025, has 43 million views, 743k likes, and 1.8 million dislikes, and faced massive backlash because of all these reasons. Commenters on YouTube have stated, “Just a friendly reminder that this has been in the works for TEN YEARS,” and another said, “My expectations were low. They should’ve been lower.” Overall, the initial release had many disappointments.
Content creators made memes from the trailers, which eventually led to theatres being trashed by viewers due to them being so widespread and chaotic. In one of the scenes of the trailer, Steve dramatically yells, “Chicken Jockey!” which went extremely viral online and led to the proliferation of several memes across platforms. When this scene was played in theatres, many viewers in the crowd began to yell and throw buckets of popcorn, toilet paper, and one person even brought a real chicken, creating chaos. Many theatres began to send out warnings and kick out any instigators. Others have tried to recreate the “lava chicken” recipe, which was seen in a movie, and mashups of Steve’s funny lines have kept the buzz of the movie going.
“When the trailers came out, I thought it was just another cash grab. Then, when I saw it in theatres it wasn’t anything great, but I did think that it was hilarious. I loved how my theatre cheered to the iconic lines like ‘I am Steve,’” junior David Vardanian said.
While the movie was not the perfect adaptation of the spirit of Minecraft and started with a lot of controversy, the sensational memes and theatrical chaos turned “A Minecraft Movie” into an experience that will long be remembered by the Minecraft community.
