The Minecraft movie, featuring Jack Black and a few other famous people will be out in the US pretty soon. The classic Minecraft video game (i.e. the Java version) has been working well on Linux for ages, even on ARM-based machines, and there’s numerous great third party clients (PrismLauncher, PolyMC) and a very large community of mods and worlds that you can join online. So yeah, there is a fairly big community of Linux gamers who also happen to play Minecraft. Minecraft is a whole ecosystem in itself, with entire Youtube channels dedicated to it, physical stores, and more… No wonder that kids who get into it swear by it, and play mostly Minecraft and nothing else.

So now there’s a movie coming out, and here’s the trailer in case you have no idea what it’s supposed to look like:

So naturally, we had to ask you if you were going to watch it.

Out of those who have a remote interest in Minecraft, a good chunk of you did not feel very impressed to say the least, and a minority are going to watch it no matter what. This being said, we have seen a few successful adaptations of video games in recent years, such as the Mario movie (Nintendo), Gran Turismo (Sony) and Sonic (Sega) - while there’s a long list of really bad attempts as well. Statistically, the odds don’t look good, but as you can see from the trailer, the movie does not seem to take much risks: stay in the universe, keep as many references to the game as possible, and be very kids-friendly.

As a very casual player of Minecraft and sometimes consumer of Minecraft related content on Youtube, this movie feels by far the least interesting thing to watch about Minecraft. But Microsoft had to enter the dance sooner or later, it’s a low risk, high return kind of proposition. Even if the movie is just average, it will probably perform well just by the name recognition and Jack Black being in it. Hollywood has hardly anything to attract people in theaters these days so that’s what you end up with to sell overpriced pop-corn and drinks.

I’d rather binge watch Colorful Peach - good fun if you can follow Japanese. If you want something rather aimed at kids, yet still fairly creative, there’s also Maizen.