A world where you can build everything from the Eiffel Tower to the Taj Mahal? It’s called Minecraft.
If you’ve been living under a rock, Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time. As of October 2023, the game has sold over 300 million copies, and as of December 2024, it has over 200 million monthly active users.
A massively popular game in the 21st century… what’s the next step? A movie adaptation, of course! The video game adaptation is finally arriving in theaters on Apr. 4, 2025.
With heaps of anticipation and loads of eager video game fans, top prediction market Kalshi has opened a market for users to bet on the film’s Rotten Tomatoes market. The market has a trading volume of over $200,000 and will be resolved on Apr. 7, 2025, at 10:00 am ET.
As of March 28, the highest forecasted score was 48, and the lowest was 38. Both of these scores are Rotten, suggesting that users anticipate a poor reception from critics.
Before making your own decision on the film’s critical reception, here’s what you need to know about A Minecraft Movie.
Read more: How To Predict Rotten Tomatoes Scores
What is ‘A Minecraft Movie’?
A Minecraft movie adaptation has been in development since 2014, only three years after the game’s release in 2011. The movie adaptation went through many directors and writers before landing on director Jared Hess and a screenplay by Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, and Chris Galletta.
Welcome to the world of Minecraft, where creativity doesn’t just help you craft, it’s essential to one’s survival! Four misfits—Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, Henry, Natalie, and Dawn—find themselves struggling with ordinary problems when they are suddenly pulled through a mysterious portal into the Overworld
The film has a star-studded cast featuring Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers, Sebastian Hansen, and Jennifer Coolidge. After delays as a result of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, the film was shot in January 2024 in New Zealand.
Past critical reception of video game movies
Video game adaptations have been hit-or-miss in the past. Besides the difficulty of adapting the video game medium into the movie medium, it is also hard to balance the original creativity of a screenwriter and the faithfulness to the original material.
This tension has created an uneven track record for these adaptations on Rotten Tomatoes.
Movie | Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer Score |
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024) | 85% |
Borderlands (2024) | 10% |
Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023) | 32% |
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) | 59% |
Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story (2023) | 65% |
Uncharted (2022) | 41% |
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) | 69% |
Mortal Kombat (2021) | 55% |
Werewolves Within (2021) | 86% |
Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) | 64% |
These 10 video game film adaptations have performed all over the place. The highest score was an 86% for Werewolves Within, and the lowest was a horrible 10% for Borderlands.
The average score is about 56%, which is a Rotten score. Given the average, it isn’t too surprising that Kalshi users are betting 42%.
Unfortunately, the majority of video game adaptations are not received well by critics. On Rotten Tomatoes’s 54 Video Game Movies Ranked list, only seven of the projects have Fresh scores.
The Fresh scores are exceptions. On the bright side, all seven Fresh scores are for movies from 2019 and later. This may mean that critics are recently more willing and open when reviewing these adaptations.
The director Hess’s track record is also not great. He is best known for his work on Napoleon Dynamite, which got a Fresh score of 72. Unfortunately, four of the five other feature films he’s directed have a Rotten score.
All of these signs point to a poor Rotten Tomatoes score, but wait, there’s more…
The movie is released on April 4 but the embargo date is going to be lifted on April 02 at 3 pm ET. The embargo is close to the movie’s release date, potentially indicating the studio’s concern about reviews impacting ticket sales.
The final negative sign is the reaction to the first trailer. The film was heavily ridiculed on social media by users. Some even compared the film to the first Sonic movie’s backlash, which led to them redoing the animation.
The minecraft movie looks like a parody from YouTube.
— Coinbox Tees (@CoinboxTees) September 4, 2024
Unfortunately, all of these aspects of the film may lead to the movie bombing among critics. However, the star-studded cast, including Jack Black’s trademark humor, could potentially surprise critics.
Moreover, the recent trend of video game adaptations showing improvement suggests there’s room for unexpected success. We will just have to wait and see.
