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‘Minecraft’ Movie Gets An ‘Always Sunny’ Director, A Release Date, And Plot Detail Reveal

By Dustin Kemp
Published on: 21:56 PST, Jun 27, 2016

Deadline reports that the movie-fied version of the immensely popular computer simulation Minecraft has finally been confirmed along with a release date, a broad plot description, and a director who has proven he also has some acting chops on the hit sit-com It’s Always Sunny inPhiladelphia.

The official site of Mojang, the Swedish company that developed and published the Minecraft game and is heading up production of the film, announced earlier this week that the Minecraft movie, which has yet to settle on a name, will be directed by none other than Rob McElhenney, who takes on the role of Mac on It’s Always Sunny in addition to acting as a partial showrunner.

The announcement that McElhenney is directing Minecraft‘s filmic incarnation is huge news for moviegoers and Minecraft fans alike, as it means that the movie may very well take on a bit of the irreverent, dryly humorous tone for which It’s Always Sunny is known.

It may be even bigger, however, for McElhenney himself, who will be making his feature film-directing debut with the Minecraft movie.

As for the plot, McElhenney and Mojang are still being a bit vague on the details. Roy Lee, one of the film’s producers, elaborated in a recent interview with Collider, saying the Minecraft movie will be an extremely accurate representation of the game itself.

“Minecraft would be part of a multiverse that humans can enter, that has the feel of a live-action version of a Minecraft experience. [We’re going for] the same target audience as Jurassic World.”

He continued that since Mojang, the game’s developers, will be working very closely with Warner Bros., the movie’s production studio, every step of the way, the movie will be totally in-synch with the latest Minecraft updates. In fact, the people behind the scenes of the movie already know where the Minecraft game is headed and have been able to devise a plot for the Minecraft movie accordingly.

“We can put things into the movie around the same time they relaunch newer versions of the game, and at the same time, potentially taking ideas from the movie and putting them into the game,” Lee explains. So I don’t know exactly what things are going into the game, but they know exactly what’s going into the movie.”

It sounds like the people behind the Minecraft movie have a solid idea of where the plot might be going and even the kind of filmmaking that will be employed to move the movie along, but they are remaining tight-lipped at this point.

Luckily for Minecraft fans, though, Mojang COO Vu Bui announced on Mojang’s blog that they will be sharing a steady stream of information about the movie between now and its release.

“As time goes on we’ll share loads more. Loads!” he said, and judging by Lee’s statement that the filmmakers already know what’s going in the Minecraft movie, we know that there is certainly a lot to share.

Unfortunately, the stream of information, if it is to last until the Minecraft movie debuts, will have to be a very long stream indeed; the release date was revealed to be May 24, 2109.

“Yes, that might seem like a long time away,” Bui writes in his blog post after announcing the release date, “but it just so happens to be the right amount of time to make it completely awesome.”

A.V. Club points out that a Minecraft-inspired movie was inevitable after the massive success of 2014’s The Lego Movie, and the ongoing production of several other films based on block-centric games, such as the recently announced Tetris trilogy and the sequel to The Lego Movie itself (which happens to be set for exactly the same release date as the Minecraft movie), is a further testament to that fact.

Let’s hope that McElhenney’s directing and the Jurassic World-like plot of the Minecraft movie don’t let us down is 2019. After all, as Bui writes, “we all want an awesome Minecraft movie, right?”

[Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images]

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