The Minecraft Movie Coming From The Lego Movie Producer and Warner Bros.
Markus Persson, creator of the highly successful Minecraft, confirmed the Minecraft movie is in the works with Warner Bros. on the heels of the LEGO Movie.
Minecraft is one of the most widely recognized and distributed video games on the market. Starting as a small PC game in 2009 in beta form, Swedish developer Mojang has constantly updated and released new material for a game that is currently on iOS, Android, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3. PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions are due to be released in 2014 as well.
Someone is trying leak the fact that we’re working with Warner Brothers on a potential Minecraft Movie. I wanted to be the leak!
— Markus Persson (@notch) February 27, 2014
Warner Bros. purchased the rights and is already garnering a great deal of interest according to Deadline. Producer Roy Lee, who already has a blockbuster in The LEGO Movie, is attached to the project along with Jill Messick who produced Paramount’s Mean Girls. The film will be live action rather than the CG animated LEGO Movie.
A Minecraft movie is the next logical building block for Warner Bros. as there are many similarities between The LEGO Movie and Mojang’s video game universe. Minecraft is an open world where players start with nothing but their blocky hands to create castles, large monuments or their own massive creations. The only limitations are what the game has available to build with similar to the premise of master builders. LEGO actually produces a series of Minecraft building sets based off the game for those who want to try their hand at real world projects.
Players can build freely with no restrictions, or they can participate in a day and night cycle where monsters, such as the fan favorite Creeper, come out at night and hunt your character unless you have built a house with a door to keep them out. The game has over 100 million users and has been downloaded to over 14 million Windows and Mac computers. Over 10 million copies have been sold on the Xbox 360 platform and the PlayStation 3 version was released a few months ago and has been selling strong as well.
The game has proven popular enough for fans of the game to turn to Kickstarter to make their own full length live action film entitled Birth of Man. A full length trailer was produced but Kotaku revealed the project was shut down recently by Mojang and now with news about Warner Bros. purchasing the rights, the reasoning behind dismantling the fan fueled project is more obvious.
Feature films based on movies are nothing new. Films like Resident Evil have found enough of a following to produce 4 entries into the series while stinkers such as In The Name of the King rank amongst some of the worst movies ever made. The Minecraft movie has some heavyweight names giving it a chance of being something worth assembling.
