Earlier this month, Warner Bros. Pictures shared the first teaser for A Minecraft Movie. As the first-ever big-screen, live-action adaptation of the best-selling video game of all time, fans are eager to see some of the game's core mechanics come to life.
One of the big focal points of Minecraft is player crafting. From in-game creations using the various elements you come across to player modding, crafting is a huge deal in Minecraft. So naturally, the team had to find a way to make it work in the live-action movie.
During Minecraft Live 2024, Mojang’s creative director of entertainment Torfi Frans Olafsson and director Jared Hess sat down to share some exclusive insights into how they brought Minecraft to the big screen. The two discussed a range of topics, from why they chose the live-action format to why it's called A Minecraft Movie and not "The Minecraft Movie."
A Minecraft Movie follows four misfits — Garrett "The Garbage Man" Garrison (Jason Momoa), Henry (Sebastian Hansen), Natalie (Emma Myers) and Dawn (Danielle Brooks) — who find themselves pulled through a mysterious portal into the Overworld. It was revealed that Henry is viewed as a "creator." Hess pointed out that a big part of Minecraft is he creator community and modders.
"We thought that the Henry character could represent the mode," Olafsson explained. "The person who takes the vanilla game and tweaks it and adjusts it and then comes into the Minecraft world. He meets Steve, and Steve knows everything about vanilla Minecraft."
"Figuring out crafting was super fun," he added. "When the game came out, there wasn't even a recipe book. People were like, 'Wait, what happens if I put these things like that?' When these new characters come into the world, they don't these recipes."
The duo then shared a new clip featuring Jack Black's Steve showing Henry and Garrett how a crafting table works. Much like the game, the characters arrange ingredients on a crafting table in a specific pattern representing the item they want to appear. Then they smack it with a hammer, and it magically appears.
"When we were designing crafting and talking about what it should look like, we basically started at the crafting table itself," explained Olafsson. "We looked at the crafting table and we looked at the endgame textures. And it has this super pixelated picture of a hammer and a saw on the side. So obviously that was built into the real-world crafting table. So we got this hammer and we figured we honor the three-by-three grid and thought it would be cool and kind of fun and gratifying to give ti a massive whack and have things appear."
As big as crafting is in Minecraft, it's just one part of the game. I personally can't wait to see what else the creative team has thought up when developing the live-action movie and how they plan on bringing other gameplay elements to life.
A Minecraft Movie is see to release on April 4, 2025.