It may have taken around 10 years of on-and-off development, but a big-screen Minecraft movie is finally on its way. Warner Bros. Pictures released the long-awaited first teaser for the film, aptly titled A Minecraft Movie, in early September to mixed responses from both casual viewers and die-hard video game fans alike. While some seemed to immediately buy into the Jared Hess-directed film’s bright, colorful look and heightened, family-friendly sense of humor, others have already found its digital aesthetic and tone a bit off-putting.
Unsurprisingly, the film’s producers and creative team seem intent on winning over as many existing Minecraft fans as they can. During this weekend’s online 2024 Minecraft Live event, a new clip from A Minecraft Movie was unveiled that fittingly focuses on the art of crafting in the cubic fictional realm of the Overworld. In the clip, expert crafter Steve (Jack Black) introduces two of the film’s Overworld newbies, Garrett (Jason Momoa) and Henry (Sebastian Hansen), to a crafting table and explains how to use it by creating an iron sword out of just a handful of materials and a hammer.
Unfortunately, when Momoa’s Garrett attempts to one-up Steve by showing off his own crafting skills, things don’t go how he expects.
Fans will no doubt be happy to see that the elements Steve uses to craft his sword, as well as the pattern he forms with them, all line up perfectly with how you create an iron sword of your own in Minecraft. Garrett’s pair of chain-linked buckets, however, seems to be an item unique to A Minecraft Movie. Players will have to wait to see whether it gets added to the game at some point in conjunction with the film’s 2025 release.
A Minecraft Movie still won’t hit theaters for another few months, so fans should likely expect to see a lot more footage from the film between now and then. Whether or not its future trailers and clips manage to sway players’ opinions better than its first teaser remains to be seen. Either way, it doesn’t look like Hollywood plans to back away at all from its ongoing bet on the viability and profitability of video game adaptations.
A Minecraft Movie seems like the kind of gamble that could either pay off extremely well or completely bust. For now, it looks like it’s gotten the crafting part of its source material right, so at least there’s that.
A Minecraft Movie is set to debut in theaters on April 4, 2025.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.