Minecraft movie assembles new release date, plot details

April 17th 2019, 10:08am

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Did you all remember there was a Minecraft movie that was supposed to be coming out in *checks bare wrist pretending there’s a watch* one month from now in May? Well, turns out, the production schedule doesn’t look good for meeting that release date, so Warner Bros. and game developer Mojang have announced that the movie’s release is being pushed back several years to 2022. You could say they have a lot of blocks to stack up before it they get started…amiright?!

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Developer Mojang made the announcement via the Minecraft website and that it has the new release date of March 4, 2022. According to the site, that’s “only 1053 days. Or about 34 months, or 150 weeks, or a million and a half minutes” away. Peter Sollett (NICK & NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST) will be handling directing duties after Rob McElhenney (IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA) left the project back in August. Writer Jason Fuchs (WONDER WOMAN) was hired to write the script, but when the first director hired for the movie left the project, Shawn Levy, he was replaced with Aaron and Adam Nee.

This movie was first announced in early 2014 (around the time THE LEGO MOVIE came out), and we’ve heard precious little about it in the five years since then. While we don’t know who is set to star, Mojang did offer a bit of a plot tease with the announcement, saying it’s about “the story of a teenage girl and her unlikely group of adventurers. After the malevolent Ender Dragon sets out on a path of destruction, they must save their beautiful, blocky Overworld.”

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Warner Bros. was likely keen to get another block-based movie going after the success of THE LEGO MOVIE, which they also spun out into a series of new movies, the most recent being THE LEGO MOVIE: THE SECOND PART earlier this year. Other studios are getting in on the action, with PLAYMOBIL: THE MOVIE aiming to achieve the same success.

The Minecraft adaptation is one I keep hearing about once every few months, but not a ton of progress has been made on it. The team plans to make it a full live-action movie, and doing something like that around a world completely made up of blocks sounds incredibly difficult to make, so it stands to reason why they’ve needed the better part of a decade to get it together. Time for the team to break out the axes and get to work, because those "million and a half" minutes are ticking away fast.

MINECRAFT will hit theaters March 4, 2022.