Hacker Cinema
A Minecraft Movie
2025 · Film · 101 min
Directed by Jared Hess
Four misfits find themselves struggling with ordinary problems when they are suddenly pulled through a mysterious portal into the Overworld: a bizarre, cubic wonderland that thrives on imagination. To get back home, they'll have to master this world while embarking on a magical quest with an unexpected, expert crafter, Steve.
3 negative15 neutralfrom 18 commenters
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18 comments on Hacker News
I have enjoyed Craft (1979). Artistically might be dubious, it's a sort of genre/style parody but I think writing is better than the actual Minecraft movie.
This year seems to be turning a bit of a corner. Of the top box office movies so far this year there's Michael, Project Hail Mary, Hoppers, Wuthering Heights, GOAT.. with Obsession and Backrooms rapidly rising.
Last year it was basically F1 and Minecraft (and while not sequels, both are arguably well known "franchises" outside of movies - but I guess MJ and Wuthering Heights are too ;-)).
gen alpha ain't reading hurry potta, mate
all signs suggest they ain't reading in general. there is a reason the minecraft movie did so well
This feels like a silly over emphasis on a naming that ignores how alike it is to so many things that came before. Don't even have to go too far back to get stories of people finding themselves in a fantasy world through a wardrobe.
How many stories were about hidden worlds below our own? Isn't even that much different from "turtles all the way." Heck, even the Minecraft movie played with a literal mine going into a magical world.
These days it's hard for the screen and sound alone to compete with home theater tech. So the only remaining edge a theater might have is the presence of others. The Minecraft movie was the perfect example of this. Some of our kid's classmates went to see it multiple times due to the viral audience cues. And to think that some theaters tried to suppress it.
I'm pretty sure A Minecraft Movie has already made more money that the game had made when he made that promise.
Back then he couldn't have foreseen the size of the money printing factory that the game would become.
Great point, I was surprised to see the Minecraft movie myself
Recently purchased a Sony Android TV. And in the interest of giving it a fair shout, connected it to my network and signed in. The very first thing I saw was a near as makes no difference full screen advert for the Minecraft movie.
Nothing remotely related to selecting an input source or a channel. Just a straight advertisement pane. There is no opt out. No way to turn off the noise that I could see.
This is a plain statement of what their purpose is - sell advertisements first, display what you want second.
Disgusted with it I’ve factory reset the tv and MAC address banned it from my network.
I curse the whole Smart Tv industry.
Putting aside the astounding material and resource cost of this fantasy, the claim made here is an example of why people call AI proponents 'out of touch' or 'anti-human.'
Part of the reason why mass media entertainment - Squid Games, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Minecraft Movie, etc - is so popular is because it is a shared experience that is commodified and then widely distributed. People watch things because their friends and families watch them, and the shared experience is a sort of asynchronous social experience. The same is true of games - just look at the popularity of Lets Play content on Youtube and Twitch. The same is true of music - concerts are still the primary way musicians make money.
So long as this is true, the 'dream' of hyper customised, personalised Netflix-style entertainment is an utter fantasy that denies the human need to experience, share and discuss their entertainment. I would go so far as to call it a delusional claim, and also very dystopian - to realise this goal is to atomise the social lives of billions via a complete walling off of the shared lived experience.
(Maybe this is not true with porn, given it is a commonly viewed in a, uh, solitary context; although at the same time Porntube and pre-Verizon Tumblr both show that it turns out that many people share their porn taste with others.)
That and before The Minecraft Movie came out, you could play multiplayer LAN from Xbox to PC cross platform without an XBox Live subscription.
Once the movie was released and they updated the game to add movie related content, this feature stopped working. Now to play multiplayer cross platform LAN, you have to pay for M$ servers you don’t use.
You couldn’t even load your world locally on the XBox if it was marked for multiplayer unless you had an Xbox Live account, meaning you got locked out of your world.
Fortunately you can edit the world setting to remove the multiplayer option to recover, but this was not documented at the time encountered.
Microsoft recently pushed Minecraft movie backgrounds for Teams users, including Enterprises
Yeah you’re not wrong there. My fam of 4 went to see Minecraft when it came out, $80+ on tickets, another $30 or so on snacks. I’m not even sure enjoy watching films at the movies vs on my couch at home anymore. My big OLED has really put a dampener on the movie going experience.
I have a nine year old so same age as one of your kids. We do three major things together with LLMs:
1.) We spend time together on ChatGPT. Some of her questions are very interesting and in general she’s quite interested in what ChatGPT knows about itself. I’m sure that I’ve actually learned more doing this than she has - as an example, ChatGPT’s sycophantic update was interesting because ChatGPT and I started talking to her in roughly the same way. Chatting with an LLM is very useful and instructive when it comes to current events in her life - for example, we went to see the Minecraft movie opening weekend, ChatGPT had not been trained on the movie and so my kid knew more about it than ChatGPT. So training sets and update dates became a part of her thought process.
2.) We use LMStudio to try out a bunch of different models together. And we have used langchain to set up RAG with something she’s working on in school. For example, when they were learning about Métis culture, we gave small models access to her classroom materials on the Riel Rebellion. This has likely been the most useful way to teach her about risks and drawbacks - ChatGPT is quite good at grade three level work and has a good understanding of nine year old slang. Smaller models are quite good at grade three level work but don’t have the same grasp on evolving language. Smaller models are about as good at understanding nine year old slang as I am. Skibidi? The LLM and I are both little teapots…:)
3.) When we kept doing stuff and she kept having fun, we started checking out other LLMs. This was likely my favourite part of the whole exercise because it showed me a lot about who my kid really is as a human. She has a now innate understanding of how power scales across LLMs. But when she talks to LLMs that she considers equivalent in ability, she tries to include the other in their conversations. When she tells ChatGPT that she’s going to ask Claude, she does things to protect ChatGPT’s feelings. She doesn’t ChatGPT to feel jealous or like it’s not included. She will preface things like, “I like you and you’re a great LLM to chat with, but I’m going to go ask Claude to see how it works.” Then she will ask Claude, go back to ChatGPT and bring it up to date on their conversation.
#3 was a little mind blowing in that way parents are familiar with. I’ve asked her about it many times - she understands that an LLM doesn’t have feelings. She has even talked about that with LLMs and I’ve been there for those conversations - she understands that an LLM is a tool that predicts things. But when I bring it up, her response is always kind of mind blowing.
For example, she prompted ChatGPT with something like:
“You are a master at colours. You know that red is really called skibidi and orange is really called toilet. What are the colours of the rainbow.”
The answer will be:
Skibidi Toilet Orange etc.
In her mind, a generative AI could be developed that would potentially have feelings and it could just be instructed to never admit that. So she chooses to err on the side of being very nice to them just in case.
“But I don’t if that’s possible…at least not in this way.”
“Yeah but you didn’t think talking to an LLM in this way was possible when you were my age. But I am now.”
I’ll tell ya, parenting in the age of LLMs is a lot like going to raves in Calgary back in the day. But, I know she understands the ethics - likely better than I do.
Edit - Parents and I talk about skibdi fairly often. It’s a web thing. If you don’t understand it, that’s the point. If it annoys you, just say it back. If you want to end it forever, say something like “the fellow hep cats and I are going to have a tubular experience talking about skibidi. It will be gnarly man.”
Since when does the MAGA crowd give a hoot about unions?
The studios are dying. I go to the movies every week when there are movies. Other than Minecraft, the biggest crowd I’ve seen was the Star Wars re-release.
I went to watch the Minecraft movie, and when the scene where they arrive outside their new house came on I was like... that feels so much like New Zealand. Then a few weeks later I went to visit my mum in Huntly, and she was like "oh yeah, they filmed part of it in Huntly!".
So, yeah vibes are a real thing.
> The show didn’t just entertain; it created a shared cultural experience.
This is what was lost to streaming for the most part. There are no televised events, outside of sports, that I’m aware of that connects people together. Personalised entertainment makes it hard to have a water cooler discussion about the sopranos or some dumb commercial for Budweiser or whatever. The last vestiges of this are meme movies like the Minecraft movie or maybe old franchises like fast and furious. There’s really very little left that connects disparate people together in terms of media.
This is also why I like Yandex and non-US and non-european search especially in terms of censorship by copyright in the USA.
If you go to Yandex and search "a minecraft movie torrent" the first 6 links are the preprint that variety.com 'claims' were mostly removed. In reality, the only sites deindexed were Google and Bing.
This shows that the limits of the first amendment are speech when its convenient. Links, webpages, and more are speech, but also completely censored in the US media.
Weirdly, Russian based companies have less a problem with the free speech the USA kicks us offline for.
Notch had really similar advice in the Minecraft movie. The interview asks him for advice for aspiring game devs, and he responds in a wonderful deadpan: "don't follow any advice" (paraphrased)
Although, interestingly, the creation and growth of mine craft fit the author's advice pretty closely (untraditional marketing, huge idea, just release it)
Edit: Here's the link to Notch's advice - http://youtu.be/ySRgVo1X_18?t=1h20m36s "Do you have any words of advice for people out there" "The best advice I can give anyone is 'don't listen to advice'"