'Minecraft' Box Office: The Key Lesson From A $314M Debut
A film based on a new property beloved by *today's* kids, fronted by actors well-liked by *today's* kids, represents a "formula" that Hollywood cannot afford to ignore.
In the end, Hollywood didn’t really need a Superman. Just a Steve…
Warner Bros. Discovery and Legendary Pictures’ A Minecraft Movie, intended (like Five Nights At Freddy’s) for your kids but not for you, just earned $163 million in North America and $314 million worldwide on a $150 million budget. That’s the biggest Fri-Sun opening ever for a video game movie. However, The Super Mario Bros. Movie opened on a Wednesday amid its $146 million Fri-Sun/$204 million Wed-Sun debut in April 2023. Inflation notwithstanding, it’s the third-biggest April opening behind only those last two “opened in the last week of April” Avengers movies ($258 million in 2018 and $356 million in 2019). It’s ahead of even WB’s Barbie ($162 million in 2023) among the top non-sequel debuts that (unlike Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Black Panther and The Avengers) don’t require an asterisk. It gave theaters their first $200 million total weekend since the last two weekends in November.
“The trailer left me confused and bewildered on a level not seen since I took my daughter to Demon Slayer - The Movie: Mugen Train. Once again, I’m 45 years old; these franchises should be based on books I’ve never heard of, shows I’ve never watched, and/or properties that are at least newer than the Affordable Care Act.
I wrote that last week regarding Universal’s CinemaCon presentation, specifically the first trailer to Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie. Some of my earliest and most critical movie-specific memories were of my parents taking me to films aimed at me that were terrible. I mean, even as a kid, I *knew* The Karate Kid part III was a pale shadow of its predecessors, and I *knew* Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II was a patronizing, condescending, and edged-off follow-up to the shockingly good and mature (not just in terms of tone and violence) 1990 original. And I knew my parents were probably trying their best not to fall asleep, but that was okay. And while I felt a little guilty at the time for making my parents suffer on my account, then and now, I knew it was part of the bargain. That bargain was in full force this weekend, and thank goodness.
“I want you to know that, if I did have a son, and the opportunity presented itself to wake him up to watch a baseball game or to listen to the president on the radio, or for absolutely no reason at all...”
— ‘Boy Meets World’ Season 1, Episode 3 “Father Knows Less”
That’s a quote I used to set up a very old Mendelson’s Memos post. As pundits reacted to a mass shooting inside a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises by asking why kids were in a theater so late, as opposed to “Why was this mentally-ill individual able to access weapons of war to unleash hell on a civilian population?” Then and (hopefully) now, parents took their kids to early screenings of big movies not because they wanted to see them, but because their kids did. If anything, beyond the grim cultural decline we’ve experienced since that notable act of domestic terrorism, what’s “changed” in the last 13 years is that — a trend that arguably began with Michael Bay’s Transformers — too many of the big movies allegedly aimed at all audiences are, in fact, aimed less at today’s kids and more at their nostalgic parents.