Minecraft: Matt Berry in talks to join Jason Momoa in video-game movie

Deadline reports that Matt Berry (What We Do in the Shadows) is in negotiations to star in the Minecraft movie alongside Jason Momoa (Fast X).

Details about the Minecraft movie are still being kept under wraps, as is the role Matt Berry would be playing. Minecraft allows players to explore a blocky, procedurally generated 3D world. They can mine and extract raw materials to craft tools and build anything their imagination can conjure up. A few short years after it launched, Microsoft acquired Mojang Studios, the video game company behind Minecraft, for a cool $2.5 billion. Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess to set to helm the Minecraft movie for Warner Bros, but he’s just the latest in a long line of directors on the project.

The studio has been trying to develop a Minecraft movie for many years. Shawn Levy (The Adam Project) was once slated to direct the film but departed after creative differences with Mojang, the video game studio behind Minecraft. “What happened simply is, Warners asked me to develop kind of how might this ever be a story for a movie, because it’s not a narrative game,” Levy told the Wall Street Journal in 2014. “We came up with an approach that felt good to us and I discussed it with Mojang, the game makers who make Minecraft, and they were like, ‘that doesn’t sound like what we want if we’re gonna see a movie get made. We don’t know what we want, but that doesn’t feel right.’ And I said ‘Okay, well that feels like that’s a movie I can envision.’” It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star Rob McElhenney stepped in to replace him and talked with Steve Carrell to star, but wound up departing himself. Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist director Peter Sollett then took the reins, but when Warner Bros. removed the film from their schedule due to the pandemic, Sollett left as well.

Matt Berry will soon be reprising his role of Laszlo Cravensworth in the fifth season of What We Do in the Shadows, which will debut on FX on July 13th.