A Minecraft Movie just had the all-time best opening weekend for a video game adaptation, racking up $163 million at the domestic box office.
That result wildly overperformed its tracking, revealing that — like an industrious teen building a sprawling fortress on their private server — Minecraft has quickly built up a cultural cache that can rival Mario in a fraction of the time.
Video Game Adaptations Have Changed
When The Super Mario Bros. Movie came out two years ago, no one was surprised that it found major success. Sure, the original (and, hot take, more interesting) Super Mario Bros. film had flopped in 1993, but times have changed in the three decades that separate the two adaptations. A few months before, The Last of Us had proved that video game adaptations could now be prestige fare. Sonic and Detective Pikachu had likewise shown that video game movies could be blockbuster hits and not utter garbage at the same time. The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Decades of superhero movies have changed the consensus around adaptations, too. In the ’90s, Hollywood tended to approach video games and comic books as low culture that needed to be significantly altered before it could attract a mainstream audience. An adaptation being “faithful” is good now, but it wasn’t in the ’90s. The X-Men had black leather suits in the Fox movies because comics-accurate costumes were considered too goofy (referenced when Cyclops asks Wolverine if he would prefer to wear “yellow spandex”).
More importantly, the 30 years between both movies has allowed for several new generations to become Mario fans. The result was that people in their fifties who were kids when the first game came out in the ’80s could take their grandkids to see the movie and they could both get it. Everyone in between, too, had the opportunity to get to play Mario games as a kid. The plumber’s longevity gave the movie a broad appeal that crossed generational lines. Which is why it’s absolutely bananas that A Minecraft Movie beat The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s opening weekend haul of $146.4 million, to earn the best opening ever for a video game movie.
And Minecraft Is Reaping The Rewards
Sure, Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time, with 350 million copies sold. But it’s surprising to see a 14-year-old game that two generations of players (Gen Z and Gen Alpha) grew up with supplant a series that players have fallen in love with for nearly 40 years. You can bet there were a ton of people in Gen X and over who hadn’t heard of Minecraft until this weekend, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn’t heard of Mario.
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So how did Minecraft do it? Well, young people drive ticket purchases for event movies like this. It’s why 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home was able to sling its way to nearly two billion dollars at a time when Covid concerns were still keeping older adults at home. When you’re attempting to get butts in seats for a blockbuster, 18-35 is the most valuable demographic. Among adults, that’s the audience that is most aware of Minecraft, and most likely to take their younger siblings or kids.
Whatever the reason, it’s still wild to see a franchise that is less than a decade-and-a-half old beat out Mario and Barbie — two IPs that bring several generations together — especially since its mindshare is almost entirely built on the back of one game, the original Minecraft. Having Jack Black and Jason Momoa attached doesn’t hurt, but Borderlands and Aquaman 2 prove that their names don’t necessarily help that much, either.
No, Minecraft as a brand did the heavy lifting, and we’ve witnessed a cultural shift make itself known in a profound way. Mario has long been synonymous with video games, but now Minecraft will represent the hobby to the broadest possible audience.
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