He's also under a lot of pressure. A Song of Ice and Fire, the seven-book epic that began with A Game of Thrones (hence the TV adaptation's name), has only five books written so far. The most recent tome, A Dance with Dragons, arrived in 2011. If you've got a calendar handy, you might recognise that it's 2025, nearly a decade and a half later.

He's not just been twiddling his thumbs, mind, but in a recent blog post to his website wherein he reveals he's working on an adaptation of Howard Waldrop's A Dozen Tough Jobs, he, uh, goes on a bit of a tangent.

After announcing that he'll be working on the adaptation, Martin proceeds to use the mother of all opening brackets to tear into hypothetical (though no doubt extant) fans who keep asking him why he hasn't written The Winds of Winter, yet. I don't usually do this, but I think it's important to quote it here in its entirety—it's also important to state that Waldrop is a late and dear friend of Martin's, who died in 2024.

"(I know, I know. Some of you will just be pissed off by this, as you are by everything I announce here that is not about Westeros or The Winds of Winter. You have given up on me, or on the book. I will never finish [The Winds of Winter]. If I do, I will never finish A Dream of Spring. If I do, it won’t be any good. I ought to get some other writer to pinch hit for me…"

Deep breaths, we're not halfway done yet.

"I am going to die soon anyway, because I am so old. I lost all interest in A Song of Ice and Fire decades ago. I don’t give a shit about writing any longer, I just sit around and spend my money. I edit the Wild Cards books too, but you hate Wild Cards. You may hate everything else I have ever written, the Hugo-winners and Hugo-losers, 'A Song for Lya' and Dying of the Light, 'Sandkings' and Beauty and the Beast, 'This Tower of Ashes' and 'The Stone City,' Old Mars and Old Venus and Rogues and Warriors and Dangerous Women and all the other anthologies I edited with my friend Gardner Dozois.

"You don’t care about any of those, I know. You don’t care about anything but Winds of Winter. You've told me so often enough)."

While this might come off as Martin very much losing his temper, I certainly don't envy the guy—to've authored something as culturally titanic as A Song of Ice and Fire, then to be asked to finish it, especially as the gap between books grows wider and wider? Moreover, I sympathise with his frustration at the idea that because he hasn't completed something, he doesn't care about it. Something I don't think is true at all, and something he emphatically rallies against:

"Thing is, I do care about them. And I care about Westeros and Winds as well. The Starks and Lannisters and Targaryens, Tyrion and Asha, Dany and Daenerys, the dragons and the direwolves, I care about them all. More than you can ever imagine."

It might simply be the project he's on now that has him feeling existential. Waldrop, a fellow writer and science fiction author, was a longtime friend of Martin, and he died aged 77 of a stroke in January 2024. You can read Martin's very touching tribute to him here, where he wrote: "We are making a couple of other Waldrop adaptations as well, and I promised him I’d get him a cut of those as well before the end of January. I never dreamed when hanging up that we would never speak again."

I won't pretend to be in the man's head, or speak for him. However, if I was in the middle of adapting a late friend's work, only to have some complete stranger bark at me for not finishing a book? It'd boil my blood somethin' fierce. Martin ends his post by linking to a Hollywood Reporter piece on the upcoming adaptation, concluding: "I hope we do him justice. How can we not? Hercules, Howard, Joe, Lion Forge… I wish you all could share my excitement at the prospect of this movie."

The film will be written and directed by Alex Garland, best known for Civil War, Annihilation, and Ex Machina. He also wrote the screenplays for 28 Days Later and Dredd.

George RR Martin, who had a hand in Elden Ring's lore, is on board as a producer.

We first heard about the project earlier in May, but the article revealing its existence was taken down and no official announcement was made until now.

Elden Ring co-op spin-off Elden Ring: Nightreign is on the verge of release—it'll be out on May 29. Meanwhile, Garland's latest movie is Warfare, which he wrote and directed with former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza. Reviews are largely positive.

So how do you make an Elden Ring movie? Hop into the comments if you have any good ideas. I suppose I'd go for something surreal and not super concerned with plot like David Lowery's The Green Knight, also an A24 film. I'm not sure that's how I'd expect Garland to approach it, though.

He does, at least, know the games: in a Reddit AMA in April, Garland said he was on a NG+6 run of Shadow of the Erdtree. He also has experience writing for games, including 2010's Enslaved: Odyssey to the West and Ninja Theory's DmC: Devil May Cry.

Good or bad, the Elden Ring movie will probably at least be a spectacle. Hopefully we see a pot with legs.

The movie is being developed by Legendary Pictures, who shared that they had acquired the film and TV rights to Street Fighter in April 2023. Not long after, the first official logo was revealed in May 2024. However, it was indefinitely delayed in March 2025 with no explanation, it was simply removed from the release schedule—which doesn't really bode well if you ask me.

Even though it hasn't been confirmed, having a list of potential actors could mean that the film is starting development rather than continuing its delay. Although this won't mean we'll see a release anywhere near its original March 2026 window, it's a step in the right direction and hopefully means we'll start to see a little more about the film in the near future.

Studio representatives declined to comment on the film's casting, so no information about which characters these actors will play, or any details on the plot, have been given. Before any word of this leaked out, a number of concept trailers started popping up online. Although they're obviously fan-made, they all star Chris Hemsworth, which suggests to me that there's one major actor missing from this current lineup.

It's far too early to speculate who else may crop up in the 2026 Street Fighter movie, but after Jason Momoa and Jack Black's on-screen chemistry in A Minecraft Movie, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw the pair back together again sometime soon. Hopefully we get more information, or at least this information confirmed, which would suggest that the film is starting production and a release over the next year wouldn't be entirely out of the question.

After the bombshell of a beginning to the second season (which I won't spoil if you haven't watched it, but seriously you need to catch up) Mazin said "It's such a narrative nuclear bomb that it's hard to wander away from it. We can't really take a break and move off to the side and do a Bill and Frank story. I'm not sure that will be necessarily true for season three. I think we'll have a little more room there. But certainly, there's no way to complete this narrative in a third season."

He continued: "Hopefully, we'll earn our keep enough to come back and finish in a fourth. That's the most likely outcome." But given the popularity of the show, I don't think earning their keep will be an issue. Especially since it was confirmed back in April that The Last of Us would return for a third season.

Mazin goes on to suggest that "there's a decent chance that season three will be longer than season two, just because of the manner of that narrative." But even with this factored in, there will still be the need for a fourth.

As long as I'm not left on a cliffhanger at the end of each episode, which The Last of Us really loves to do, I will happily sit through far more than two seasons, and I'm sure a lot of the current audience would do the same. There are too many questions left unanswered as it stands.

But Nicolas Cage playing him? Oh, I'm in. Day one, first screening. As long as we get the unhinged version of Nicolas Cage, not the serious actor version, that is.

It feels like a toss-up which Cage you'll get when you hire him. It might be a brilliant, layered performance (Leaving Las Vegas, Adaptation, Pig) or an unhinged, scenery-chewing tour-de-what (The Wicker Man, Vampire's Kiss, Face/Off). The question is, which one will show up for Madden?

Well, it's a movie about a football coach who spends four years making a videogame—so of course I'm hoping it will be a batshit crazy performance. Otherwise, it could wind up being as dull as Ben Affleck's sneaker movie.

The problem with making a movie about Madden is his entire career is a series of wins. He never had a losing season with the Raiders, taking them to the playoffs eight times and winning Oakland's first Super Bowl. He had a successful broadcasting career spanning 30 years. He raised millions for the Special Olympics, he funded college scholarships, and he spoke out in favor of making football safer for players. He seemed, quite honestly, like a heck of a nice guy.

Do I want to see a movie about a heck of a nice guy who always wins? Hell, no. I want to see a movie about a ranting, screaming, lurching trainwreck barely clinging to sanity. I demand it. Because Nicolas Cage is playing him.

Considering the third-billed actor in Madden is John Mulaney, playing Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins, I assume the main conflict for the movie comes in with the development of the first Madden game. In 1984, EA wanted a football star to put their name on it, but Madden wouldn't just take a check in exchange for his stamp of approval.

Instead, he got his huge, meaty hands on every aspect of the game and insisted it be as accurate as possible, reportedly saying "I'm not putting my name on it if it's not real" when EA tried to cut corners. Involving Madden in the development of John Madden Football (as it was called then) delayed the game for three whole years. Even Bethesda got dragged into the development, and wound up suing EA for millions afterwards. There's your drama!

That's why I'm hoping we get the unhinged Cage for this movie. I don't want to hear him say the line "I'm not putting my name on it if it's not real," while sitting in a boardroom, I want him to scream it with some "Not the bees!" level intensity while he dangles John Mulaney by his ankles off the roof of EA's headquarters. I want him to talk to the game devs with the same tone and expression he used in Vampire's Kiss.

"You have to do it. You have to include the dime defense in the in-game playbook. You have to." I want this to be his weirdest performance yet.

Will it be? Well, Christian Bale is in the movie, too, playing coach Al Davis, and his habit of vulturing awards and nominations for supporting roles (like in The Fighter) might inspire Cage to go big so he's not overshadowed. Madden is also being directed by David O. Russell, known for being a major asshole on set: he almost had a fist-fight with George Clooney, he verbally abused Lily Tomlin, and left Amy Adams "just devastated" on a near-daily basis during American Hustle.

The combo of pushy director and award-hogging co-star might be enough to inspire another batshit performance from Nicolas Cage. I sure hope so. If it's one of those grounded, nuanced, deeply captivating performances Cage pulls off when you least expect it, one that elevates the source material to new levels, one that lingers with you long after the film is over… I'll be downright disappointed.

Well, here's a twist. Instead of making a movie based on a blockbuster game like Minecraft or Super Mario Bros, someone made one based on a $4 walking simulator you can finish in about 25 minutes. And just based on the trailer, it looks a lot more faithful to the source material than most game adaptations.

Both the film and the game it's based on are called The Exit 8, and they both center around a sort of backrooms premise. In the game by Japanese developer Kotake Create, you walk down a Tokyo subway station corridor trying to find the exit. On your left are some framed posters, on your right a couple of doors, and overhead are fluorescent lights. Walk to the end of the corridor, make a couple of turns, and you find yourself back in that same corridor again.

But it's not quite the same corridor, most of the time. Some detail of the corridor has changed: maybe one of the three doors is missing, maybe the exit sign is inverted, maybe the pattern on the tile looks different. Or maybe absolutely nothing has changed.

The rules posted on the wall of the tunnel are simple: if you notice a change (the game calls them anomalies), turn around and walk back the way you came. If you see no anomalies, continue forward. You have to choose correctly eight times in a row to reach the exit and escape the tunnel. Choose wrong, and you start over.

The Exit 8 is a neat mix of the backrooms and spot-the-difference, and it's extremely unsettling: some of the anomalies are downright creepy, and by the way, you're not alone down there in that tunnel. There's a fellow with a briefcase walking through the same corridor in the opposite direction who completely ignores you—most of the time, at least.

It feels like a tricky game to make a movie about, but director Genki Kawamura has added some story elements, including the nameless main character getting a phone call with some life-changing news just before he finds himself stuck in this bizarre looping tunnel. We also see a child with him in a few of the shots from the trailer—in the game, you're alone except for that stranger with the briefcase.

The hardest part of the game is when there are seemingly no anomalies and you start to invent some of your own. "Were the tiles different? Did that poster say that last time? Is something off about the lights?" As one Steam reviewer put it: "Pay four dollars to get gaslit for an hour." (It's a positive review.) I'm interested to see how much of that self-doubt the movie can emulate.

The Exit 8 (the film) is screening at Festival de Cannes this month and will be released in August. The Exit 8 (the game) is on Steam. I've included the game trailer below, so you can compare it to the movie's trailer at the top of the page. They're both pretty freaky.

At its annual meeting with advertisers last week, Netflix revealed plans to start showing AI-generated content to its ad-tier subscribers. These AI ads are slated to begin rolling out in 2026.

Amy Reinhard, Netflix's President of Advertising, claimed during the meeting that "[Netflix] members pay as much attention to mid-roll ads as they do to the shows and movies themselves."

Maybe it's just me, but I have yet to meet someone who pays an ounce of attention to Netflix ads. Even the few ad connoisseurs out there will probably not appreciate an influx of AI-generated garbage interrupting their episodes of Stranger Things.

Alternately, Reinhard could be making an utterly damning statement about how much people care about their Netflix programming⁠—is the glass half-full, or half-empty here?

According to The Verge, Netflix reportedly wants to sneakily blend its AI slop into your shows with pause ads themed around the program you're watching, featuring AI-generated content inserted in the scene or an AI-generated overlay over the screen.

It reminds me of the Cerveza Cristal beer ads that were cut into Chilean TV reruns of Star Wars, just minus the human touch⁠—Netflix's proposal sounds low-rent in a trashy, rather than charming way.

It's hard to say whether Netflix genuinely thinks this is a good idea that will improve their service (which seems intensely out of touch) or if they are simply trying to get more of their 94 million ad-tier subscribers to upgrade to their more expensive ad-free plan.

Regardless, this is yet another move that makes Netflix a less consumer-friendly platform as prices continue to rise and password sharing becomes a luxury of the past.

Personally, random AI-generated ads interrupting my favorite shows and movies will do nothing but annoy me (and probably be the final nail in the coffin of my cancelled Netflix subscription).

Maybe advertisers think an AI overlay demanding you buy something while watching Wednesday will boost consumer engagement, but I'm skeptical.

One has to wonder where the training data for these AI ads blended into your shows is going to come from. Will Netflix be showing an AI every show and movie on its platform so the algorithm can seamlessly generate product placements into whatever you're watching?

If so, it raises serious concerns about the copyright protections of all the people behind those shows and movies, many of whom probably don't want an AI consuming their work.

Ultimately, the fact that roughly a third of Netflix subscribers are choosing the least expensive option doesn't mean that those people just enjoy watching ads⁠—it means they are either trying to save money or don't see Netflix's offerings as valuable enough to justify paying more.

Perhaps instead of shoveling AI slop into its streaming service, Netflix should invest more in new features that add value to that subscription price, like expanding Netflix Gaming or giving hit shows more than two or three seasons.

Yeah, I'd probably watch it. Wouldn't you watch it? I like seeing people do bike flips and ski jumps and snowboard… things. Who doesn't love seeing someone jump off a cliff in a wingsuit? It's rad.

I didn't play a ton of Riders Republic but the Alps are pretty and stunts are fun, so why the heck not shoot a movie combining them? If they can keep the film to a tight 90 minutes, maybe cram in a throwaway plot where a local extreme sports hero has to defeat an evil snowboarding coalition to save a community center, I'm on board.

Directing the film, says Ubisoft, are the "famous Belgian duo Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah," who I've never heard of but who made films like Bad Boys for Life (didn't see it) and Bad Boys: Ride or Die (didn't see it).

The pair also directed 2022's Batgirl, starring Leslie Grace, Brendan Fraser, J.K. Simmons, and Michael Keaton—which I didn't even get the chance to not see because Warner Bros decided it was more profitable to write the film off as a tax break than release it. Brutal. Writing Riders Republic is screenwriter Noé Debré who won a Palme d'Or for the French film Dheepan (didn't see it) in 2015.

The track record for Ubisoft film adaptations is… mixed, I guess you'd say. At one end of the scale is Uwe Boll's notoriously stinky Far Cry film from 2008, in the "so-so" region you've got some bland attempts at adaptations like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and 2016's Assassin's Creed. The best, I think, is horror comedy Werewolves Within, based on the social deduction VR game published by Ubisoft.

Ubi has a bunch more movies and TV shows based on its properties in the works, including Splinter Cell, The Division, Ghost Recon, Watch Dogs, and Beyond Good & Evil. There's even a Skull & Bones TV show in development, or at least there was: it was announced before the actual game came out to a less-than enthusiastic reception.

You can rent A Minecraft Movie today ($19.99) or buy it ($24.99) on streaming services like Prime Video or Apple TV, which means when the chicken jockey shows up your kid can throw popcorn all over your own floor instead of the movie theater. Enjoy the show, frazzled parents!

Despite not quite making the box office bounty I predicted (one trillion dollars) A Minecraft Movie is still the biggest movie of the year in the US and the second highest grossing videogame movie of all time, a spot still held by The Super Mario Bros Movie, which made $1.36 billion. It also spawned a 34 second song that made it to the Billboard Hot 100 and its memes got so out of hand someone brought an actual chicken to a movie theater.

Did anyone bring livestock to a Chris Pratt movie? No. You can't put a price on cultural impact like that.

I imagine there's still a chance A Minecraft Movie could creep its way over the billion dollar mark in theaters, though it was dethroned at the box office in its third weekend by Sinners (another Warner Bros. jam), which itself was then trumped by Thunderbolts (I am not adding the asterisk). It's still showing at theaters near me, though only on a single screen, but ultimately I think Jack Black's Bowser will remain top dog over Jack Black's Steve.

A physical release of A Minecraft Movie isn't coming until June 24, and there's also no announced date for its streaming arrival on Max, but that will most likely happen within another month or so.

It's a dance we'll repeat every time this show gets a new season, I'd wager. How many times will that be? Well, per Aaron Moten—the actor who plays Maximus in the show—around three or four more times. Moten says the show's arc as it's currently conceived would see the whole thing last five or six seasons (via TheGamer).

"When I signed on to do the series, we would have a starting point, and they gave me the endpoint," said Moten on-stage at the recent Comic Con Liverpool event. With season 2 wrapped, that endpoint "hasn't changed," and places the end of the show somewhere around "season five, six, type of endpoint."

Which means there's a heck of a lot of the Fallout TV show left to go, assuming Amazon sticks to the plan as it is right now. "We've always known that we're going to take our time with the development of the characters," said Moten, leaving unspoken what was surely at the forefront of the creative team's minds: giving Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas fans as much time as possible to boil their brains into stew.

Don't get me wrong, I'm one of those people. Fallout 1 and New Vegas are two of my favourite games ever made, and while I enjoyed my time with FO3 and FO4, it's the West Coast tales that live in my heart. I'm incredibly curious to see what season 2 does with New Vegas as a setting now that Lucy, Maximus and co are heading there. The endings of the original game are so radically different that I struggle to imagine the show settling on a narrative that satisfies everyone, but I'd like to see it try.

Who knows? Maybe they'll reveal that the "brainrot theory" that Maximus' Brotherhood is a syncretic mash-up of Caesar's Legion and OG Brotherhood remnants is totally true. That'd make me happy, which is the most important thing.

If you're wondering, yes: Walton Goggins made his own announcement, by which I mean he tore his face off in slow motion on video. His ghoul face, I mean. Not his real one.

It should be no surprise that there's eager anticipation for Fallout season 2, considering that the Amazon show singlehandedly triggered a franchise-wise Fallout renaissance that increased daily player counts in games throughout the series by as much as 600%. People love an excuse to wander a wasteland, it turns out.

And there's a lot of excitement for one particularly beloved wasteland that the Fallout show is, by all indications, headed to next. Season 1 capped off with Hank heading New Vegas-ward, and there's been a steady stream of production leaks bubbling to the surface between seasons showing recognizable landmarks from the Mojave.

Some of that New Vegas excitement is a bit more tentative, however—if not maladaptive. Some fans were driven into a frenzy over perceived timeline discrepancies in season 1 that were taken as an indication that Bethesda was paving over New Vegas lore. Todd Howard even had to issue a placating decree, saying on an April 2024 Kinda Funny podcast that "New Vegas is a very, very important game to us."

Just how deep season 2 will dig into the New Vegas lorebooks remains to be seen, though. Will we see a Yes Man? Did the Bright Brotherhood ever make it to space? Is the show brave enough to open the Joshua Graham can of worms? Whatever happens, I'm sure the cast will have to fight plenty of geckos. It wouldn't be authentic otherwise.

As for when season 2 might air, we can only speculate. If it follows a similar production timeline to the first season, which was released just over a year after wrapping filming in March 2023, we might expect Fallout season 2 sometime in mid-2026. That's only guesswork until any official announcement, of course.

If you'd like to do your own theorycrafting about what's ahead for the TV show, we've been gathering everything we know about Fallout season 2 while we wait. And if you want to make your own Mojave homecoming, check out our handy guide for getting the best New Vegas experience on present-day PCs.

There's not much longer to wait for the endgame: Squid Game Season 3 arrives June 27. Here's the teaser:

The teaser doesn't show us a whole lot (it wouldn't be much of a teaser if it did) but there are a few rather alarming, if not completely heartbreaking, details. We get a glimpse of a new game, which begins with players using one of those big capsule vendors (like a big gumball machine that dispenses prizes) to collect a colored ball.

This vending machine appears to be used to divide players into teams, blue or red, and horrifyingly, ultra-sweet mom Geum-ja draws a red ball and her doofus son Yong-sik winds up with blue.

C'mon. Did you really have to do that to us? We all know Squid Game is gonna end with a horrifying and tragic bloodbatch, but boy, this feels like it's gonna be especially difficult to take.

I can't really glean much else from the teaser, but the cop who spent the entire last season fruitlessly searching for Squid Game Island apparently finds it—I assume he's on the correct island this time or he'd have wasted an entire two seasons doing absolutely nothing useful. We also see the return of the wealthy masked viewers from Squid Game Season 1, who somehow bankroll this entire operation but only show up to start watching toward the end. That's rich people for ya. They have luxury box seats for the baseball game and don't even show up until the 7th inning stretch.

The teaser ends with the sound of a baby crying, which feels like bad news but maybe isn't? That sound means pregnant contestant Park Mi-yeong finally gives birth, and Squid Game HQ feels like the worst possible place to welcome a new baby. But the teaser has faded to black at that point, so who knows: maybe she escaped alive and gave birth somewhere safely with a huge plastic pig full of money to guarantee her child's future?

I expect Squid Game Season 3 will be big: Squid Game Season 2 was Netflix's second-most watched non-English show of all time, only coming in behind, you guessed it, Squid Game Season 1. This is the final season of the show, but that doesn't mean that's the end of Squid Game: as recently as last year, rumors started floating around about an American adaptation, though nothing official has been announced.

The song debuts at No. 78 on the Hot 100 and, according to online data tracker Luminate (thanks Billboard) had over seven million streams in the US between April 18 and April 24. The Hot 100 made its own debut in August 4, 1958, and yep there's never been a shorter track on there.

As well as being an actor Jack Black is also a professional musician, best-known for his work with jokey rock group Tenacious D. Their song POD, from 2006's Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, spent one week on the Billboard Hot 100 at the exact same position. This is not even Black's first hit videogame song. Black plays Bowser in the Super Mario Bros. Movie and performed the song Peaches, which also broke into the Hot 100. It spent five weeks on the charts, eventually peaking at number 56.

The previous shortest song on there was Kid Cudi's Beautiful Trip, which clocks in at a frankly indulgent 37 seconds.

The Minecraft song happens when Black's character Steve decides to show his companions what happens when you combine lava with, yes, a chicken. Black then bursts into song, extolling the virtues of Steve's Lava Chicken, which admittedly does look kinda delicious. What the hell, here are the full lyrics:

La-la-la-lava ch-ch-ch-chicken

Steve's Lava Chicken, yeah, it's tasty as hell

Ooh, mamacita, now you're ringin' the bell

Crispy and juicy, now you're havin' a snack

Ooh super spicy, it's a lava attack!

I bet Black just improvised the thing to be honest. Note: Steve's lava chicken should not be confused with the chicken jockey meme.

A Minecraft Movie was released on April 4 and has been a commercial smash, grossing over $800 million worldwide accompanied by an all-out marketing blitz. It's going to continue making absolutely silly money for Warner Bros. and, unsurprisingly, a sequel is a certainty.

According to Variety, A Minecraft Movie has grossed $816 million globally, making it the biggest Hollywood movie of 2025 so far. It's earned $67.1 million in the UK, $33.7 million in Germany, $31.8 million in Australia, and $28.4 million in Mexico, just to name a few. A Minecraft Movie is in its fourth weekend in cinemas, and while earnings have slowed down, it's still going strong with $60.5 million earned just last weekend.

Two weeks ago, A Minecraft Movie reached the milestone of earning $550 million, and before this, it managed $157 million in its opening weekend, making it the most successful domestic opening weekend for a videogame adaptation ever.

Before A Minecraft Movie even aired, Chris predicted that it would make a trillion dollars. This is mostly thanks to it pandering to young audiences, which means quick comedy, explosions, singing, and obvious Minecraft references. While it may not quite reach that mark yet, it is close to dethroning The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which currently stands at $1.36 billion.

A Minecraft Movie has been filling seats in cinemas since its release, with credit due to the viral chicken jockey trend, which saw moviegoers go ballistic when the chicken jockey appeared on screen, with someone even bringing their own chicken to the event. I'm pretty sure this meme helped boost A Minecraft Movie, with many people attending viewings to try and experience the chaos.

But all good things must come to an end, and the chicken jockey meme is starting to wane. The question is whether it will die out before A Minecraft Movie can become the most successful videogame movie of all time.

An almost hilarious cherry on top of the jerkface cherry bake comes in the form of Donkey Kong 64 composer Grant Kirkhope, who blew up at Nintendo circa 2023 for not crediting him in the Super Mario Bros. Movie despite placing the DK Rap in it wholesale.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Kirkhope alleges that the long and short of it is, basically, that they didn't want to, and didn't have to, so they didn't.

"They said we decided that any music that was quoted from the games that we owned, we wouldn't credit the composers—apart from Koji Kondo. Then they decided anything with a vocal would get credited, so the DK Rap scores there. But then they decided if we also own it, we won't credit the composers. And that was the final nail in the coffin."

Legally, Nintendo isn't obligated to credit people for music it fully owns the rights to. Often, when you're working under contract for a company, you are providing labour in exchange for the rights to that labour itself.

Take this article, for example: I can say I wrote it, but I don't technically own it, and I can't make money off it like a content creator or blog owner could—I'm being paid a salary instead. Kirkhope, similarly, can't monetize the famous Donkey Kong rap.

But there's what a company is legally allowed to do and… you know, kinda being an obstinate jerk about it. Those are two different things. Kirkhope tried to appeal to the litigious gaming giant's sense of empathy, but to no avail:

"I said: I appreciate you've got your policies and all the rest of it, but by the time the credits roll in the movie to show the songs, the theatre's completely empty, everyone's gone, it's only me and my wife and my two kids sat there going 'look daddy's name!'." Alas, no dice.

"It's bizarre how they just sampled it straight from the game," Kirkhope continues. "They just plugged in the N64 and sampled it and looped it. There's no re-recording done, straight out the game. So it's me playing guitar on it. It's the lads from Rare doing the [sings] 'D-K' thing. They're all the performers on the track. So they're all in the movie uncredited."

I have to wonder aloud if this is part of a historic tendency for Japanese companies to avoid crediting people in videogames—not that companies from other countries don't make similar mistakes. Here's a great write-up from journalist John Szczepaniak, who spoke to several Japanese devs from studios including Capcom and Sega about how they'd often be forced to use pseudonyms. There's a real history there.

Whether that's the reason Nintendo's squeezed Kirkhope out of the byline or not is anyone's guess—one thing's for certain: Nintendo doesn't want to tell you about any members of the DK crew.

It's no surprise, really. This is the golden age of videogame adaptations. Fallout was great, everyone's raving about The Last of Us, the Sonic movies have made enough money to bend light around Jim Carrey, and A Minecraft Movie continues to print cash despite the deleterious effect it's apparently had on the morals of world youth.

So no wonder Sega is plumbing its archives for another trademark to turn into a Hollywood money-hose. And hey, honestly? I could imagine an OutRun movie actually being good, if it leant fully into the weirdo 'driving fantasy' vibes of the games and produced something like a speedier, 90-minute version of the Wicked Game scene from Wild At Heart.

But I'm not optimistic this Bay-fronted feature will do that, and fully expect some kind of less-good Fast and Furious from the whole thing. Besides Bay and Sweeney, the only other name currently attached to the thing (aside from a smattering of Sega execs) is scriptwriter Jayson Rothwell, whose IMDb filmography does not fill me with confidence.

Maybe I'm being too cynical, and if Rothwell and/or Bay and/or Sweeney are truly burning up with bold ideas for an OutRun film, I encourage them to ignore my mithering entirely. But the vibes around this thing, even at this early stage, don't scream box office gold to me. But hey, look on the bright side: it can't be worse than Borderlands.

Well, the thing happened in The Last of Us Season 2, the thing we've all been waiting for. It's the thing even me, a guy who only played three hours of the first TLOU game and only played zero hours of the second TLOU game, has known about since 2020 because, collectively, we are all pretty bad about keeping major events in pop-culture a secret. I am continuing the trend right now.

After watching the episode, "Through the Valley," I'm left wondering just one thing: how many HBO executives brainstormed different ways to avoid doing what The Last of Us Season 2 did last night? I'm guessing all of them.

I know the creatives behind the series wouldn't dare rewrite the show to save Joel, but I bet some suits at the network tried like hell to talk them into it. You've got the hottest Hollywood commodity, super-zaddie Pedro Pascal, Mr. Fantastic, the flippin' Mandalorian—and you want to do what to him? In episode two? There must have been a ton of meetings about how to put it off until the final episode or change the script altogether so he can keep being our favorite sexy Sunday night sad dad.

As Tim Clark put it when we were discussing the episode this morning: "Killing Pedro? In this economy?"

As for how it all goes down in the show, after all that anticipation… I was pretty unimpressed, honestly. Abby and her revenge crew had no idea how to get to Joel in the heavily guarded Jackson Hole, so I was interested in what plan she'd come up with. Her plan, ultimately, is just to become the luckiest person in the entire world and capitalize on about a hundred convenient coincidences. Huh! Good for her.

After Abby's friend (I dunno his name, who cares) ponders how they're gonna get into the town past all the walls and guards and dogs, Joel conveniently comes out of the town for one of the casual two-person patrols Jackson Hole is really stupid to send out on a daily basis—even though Ellie just reported a completely new type of scary mushroom monster in the first episode of the season. Eh, whatever, no need to send a bigger group out, I guess.

Then there's a huge storm all these expert mountain folk ignore until it's too late even though it looks like literal death hovering over the mountains, and that storm conveniently means walkie-talkies don't work and the Joel/Dina patrol and the Ellie/Young patrol have to hole up in separate abandoned buildings because the patrols extend so far from Jackson Hole they can't get back to the town. Okay, sure?

Then Abby makes the excellent tactical decision to accidentally fall down a hill and activate the biggest mushroom zombie flash mob in history that she only escapes because she runs into—surprise!—Joel, the one man she's been hunting across the entire country for five fruitless years. Wow, amazing!

The zombies all head straight for Jackson Hole, I assume because the pipes are filled with mushroom sensors the town found last episode but didn't think anything of because they're all too busy spending their time wondering: "What's with this rift between Ellie and Joel? Why is it the only thing any of us ever talk about? Don't we have our own inner lives?"

So, Abby gets Joel alone and surrounded, the town is too busy to help, and the walkie-talkies conveniently work just long enough so Ellie can conveniently split up with her partner and conveniently show up just in time to watch Joel get golf club-clubbed and then golf club-stabbed.

(Forgive me if I'm missing something, but was Abby's dad a golfer? Is that why she used golf clubs? He was a doctor, so it's possible, but she hasn't been lugging around his golf clubs for five years just to murder Joel with, has she?)

It's a shame about the shoddy plot fixins' (and by the way, the deadly storm completely ends the second Abby and her friends finish up their murderin', must be one of them-there famous twenty-minute deadly storms Wyoming is known for) because the actual confrontation is good. To be fair, this is fairly close to how it goes down in the game (I am told).

I know some fans aren't thrilled about Kaitlyn Dever playing Abby because she's not as physically imposing as her in-game counterpart, but I think she's great here (she's great in everything). I like that it's not some big glorious death for our sad zaddie hero, he's just beaten to death on the floor in some random house like Joel has done countless times to other survivors with families, then dragged home behind a horse. And Joel and Ellie being stubborn idiots for five entire years meant they never got to patch up their rift, and now it's too late. Suitably brutal.

As far as the Jackson Hole zombie mob... I have to admit, I spent most of Season 1 thinking "You know what might be good in this zombie show? Some zombies." Well, I guess I got my wish in this episode but turns out I don't think the zombies add all that much.

A big mob of mindless monsters just isn't interesting or exciting, and the one big boss zombie was either a guy in a rubber suit or CGI that looked like a guy in a rubber suit. It doesn't help that I don't care about any of the characters in Jackson Hole except Catherine O'Hara (if this show hurts her I will burn the studio down) but she wasn't even in the episode.

Back to dead Pedro and those HBO executives I imagined trying to save his life… I do feel like they have a point. No offense meant to Bella Ramsey because they're a fantastic actor, but without Joel in the story I'm not super interested in continuing to watch the show (I will still watch the show, I can't pretend I have anything better to do Sunday nights). Pascal was probably about 80% of the reason I was tuning in, considering I don't have any attachment to the game.

I expect Mando might not be gone gone, though: if there's one thing a five-year time jump between seasons allows for it's flashbacks, and that might be a concession the creatives gave to those imaginary HBO suits desperate to cling to Pascal's warm body. "Don't worry, it'll be like he was never killed in a weirdly golf-themed murder. We can flash back to him a bunch of times throughout this season! And in The Last of Us Season 3, and Season 4, and Season 5. Relax. Stop crying. Pedro Pascal will never truly die."

How do we make Mr. Fantastic's stretchy powers not look goofy af???

I genuinely don't think there's a way to pull off Mr. Fantastic's body stretching powers in a live action movie without it looking really, really silly—I will provide evidence further down the page—which is why in the first trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps they showed us everyone using their powers except Reed.

I thought the new FF trailer that dropped this week was gonna pull the same move, but then, at the very end, we're finally given a glimpse of hot super-zaddie Pedro Pascal, and he's getting stretchy. A bit. A tiny bit. It's a two-second shot and it's in slow-motion so you don't really get to see much stretchiness at all.

Look, Marvel, just show us. Show us a good long reel of Pedro Pascal with bendy noodle arms and a long floppy torso and legs that stretch all the way across the room. Let us see it in full. We'll get our giggles out now and then when the movie releases in July we'll be able to take your superhero family film as seriously as you seem to want us to.

I do sympathize with the CGI artists and animators who have to come to work every day and look at that underlined phrase on the whiteboard and then try their best to make a very stretchy man not look silly. In the comics, Reed Richards doesn't usually look dumb when his arms and legs and torso get really long, but those are still frames where you don't have to show what happens when, say, the top half of his body is stretched into one room while his legs are somehow supporting him around the corner:

fantasticfour from r/FantasticFour/comments/1g7l9sr/always_wondered_when_reed_leaps_into_action_like

And there are plenty of times when he does look dumb in the comics, like when his neck is super stretched and his arms are real skinny but his fists are huge, like in this actual image on the Marvel website. What a tool! If I could stretch I would never let anyone see me do it.

Then there's the earlier Fantastic Four movies where I think it's supposed to look goofy: if that was the goal in this clip from 2007's Rise of the Silver Surfer where Reed dances, mission accomplished. In this clip from the 2015 reboot it's pretty darn goofy too, especially the torso stretch to avoid a projectile while running. I think you should have just taken the shot, Miles Teller Reed. You'd be dead but you'd still have some dignity.

I haven't played Marvel Rivals but this video of Mr. Fantastic in action looks fun as hell, but it also looks, y'know, pretty silly, what with his noodle-arms whipping around and his big inflated body poofing up when he wants to ground pound and goomba stomp. If Pedro Pascal jumps slowly up and down in place while inflated like a puffer fish, slamming one beachball-sized fist into the ground yelling "Faaaaantastic!" over and over, I will proclaim The Fantastic Four: First Steps the best movie of the year, sure—but it will be extremely goofy.

In this clip of Elastigirl in The Incredibles, we're seeing probably the only time stretching has not only looked good but downright badass (except when she makes herself into a parachute or a boat in the first movie, which is pretty silly). But that's animation, and it's animation done by Pixar. It's an extremely tall order to translate that to live action. And since we've only gotten two slow-motion seconds of stretchy Pedro Pascal so far, I'm guessing Marvel probably isn't up to the task.

Star Wars Celebration Japan has just begun, and during a panel about the upcoming Mandalorian movie spin-off, director Shawn Levy and actor Ryan Gosling popped up to announce a new Star Wars movie coming in 2027.

"One of several theatrical projects still in development from Lucasfilm," says starwars.com, "including films by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, James Mangold, Taika Waititi and a new trilogy by Simon Kinberg, Levy's film — Star Wars: Starfighter — will star Gosling and go into production starting this fall."

Apparently it's going to explore a previously unseen era in the Star Wars timeline, roughly five years after Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and Gosling will play a new character rather than someone from the existing canon.

It's a couple of years off, with The Mandalorian & Grogu due to arrive in cinemas first on May 22, 2026. Star Wars: Starfighter will follow a year later, on May 28, 2027, and presumably have nothing to do with the 2001 Phantom Menace tie-in videogame of the same name, which we once praised for the line, "now let’s see how you deal with my favourite training canyon." Though if Ryan Gosling gets to say that it would make the internet very happy.

It's easy to see why. All those previous Resident Evil movies grossed over a billion dollars combined, The Super Mario Bros. Movie took in over $1.3 billion in 2023, and each of the three Sonic movies did in the neighborhood of half a billion each. No wonder Hollywood loves games these days.

But according to Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, games don't need Hollywood.

"The videogame business is successful by itself. It doesn’t need this outlet," Spencer told Variety, adding "let’s never turn this into something where it has to get done, every franchise has to have a game or a movie or a TV show, and it becomes more like licensing."

Of course, that's easy for him to say as A Minecraft Movie cruises past $500 million at the box office, a sequel has already been greenlit, and Minecraft TV show is in the works at Netflix. Not to mention, the Fallout TV series (Microsoft owns Bethesda now, remember) was a critical hit and a second season is currently in production. Even Halo, despite not being very good, was still given two seasons on Paramount Plus. Microsoft even took it in the other direction last year, with its videogame adaptation of a movie series: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

And despite suggesting that games really don't need to be turned into movies and TV shows, Spencer teased that there are more adaptations of Microsoft properties in the works—though he wouldn't spill any details.

"We learned from doing Halo, we learn from doing Fallout. All of these build on themselves and we’ll have, obviously, a couple that miss, it’s just kind of part of it," he said. "But I think what I’d say to the community that likes this work is, you’re going to see more [adaptations], because we’re gaining confidence, and we’re learning through this.

"That’s why it’s hard for me to tease any specific thing, because while I know all of these things that are in the creative process, I want to give them time, and I don’t want to put any undue pressure on them," Spencer said. "There’s just a lot of interest from traditional media and we’re happy about that."

It's shown no signs of slowing down—its worldwide haul is now at $552 million, putting it on pace to, potentially, dethrone the 2023 Super Mario Bros movie as the highest-earning videogame adaptation of all time.

It's a little hard to get the week-by-week play-by-play for worldwide ticket sales, since different countries report their returns at different times. However, if we go off domestic cash? A Minecraft Movie is certainly in with a chance of beating everyone's favourite plumber.

After 10 days at the Box Office, The Super Mario Bros Movie had raked in $283,480,285 at the domestic box office. Meanwhile, A Minecraft Movie is breathing down its neck, with $278,864,857 earned in the US.

Whether or not A Minecraft Movie will keep enough momentum to overtake Super Mario Bros is another question entirely: Here's the daily domestic play-by-play courtesy of boxofficemojo.com. As you can see, A Minecraft Movie had a sharper domestic falloff during weekdays, whereas the Super Mario Bros movie was still pulling numbers throughout. Mario also had the advantage of his cinematic debut falling on Easter Sunday, whereas Minecraft won't enjoy that box office boom until this weekend.

Part of me wonders if that's due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The US wouldn't declare an end to it until May 2023, but restrictions were still winding down at that point. In theory, that means the Super Mario Bros. benefitted from a bigger pool of theatre-goers caught in the venn diagram of 'I've got time to kill, because I'm either unemployed or furloughed' and restrictions that were already winding down.

It really is going to be a fascinating race. It's easy to forget that, in the face of Minecraft's worldwide presence (and the movie's made-in-a-lab marketability), this is still a game that started out as a little indie survival number. I remember an age when it was still spreading through word-of-mouth with popular youtubers.

To chart its journey from that, into a world-wide phenomenon that can go toe-to-toe with one of gaming's oldest mascots at the box office? It's, quite frankly, wild. No wonder Warner Bros is making a sequel.

Jack Black randomly turned up at A Minecraft Movie viewing, and as he was walking in, he started to lay out the rules for this showing: "For today's presentation of A Minecraft Movie, please, no throwing popcorn, and also no lapis lazuli, and also absolutely no chicken jockeys!" Cuerabid screaming and perhaps the best reaction to someone unexpectedly seeing Jack Black in the wild—one kid who just screeched "NO!"

Black then proceeded to hold up an iron pickaxe and ask, "Are you ready to rock?" and then run around the cinema holding the pickaxe over his head as crowds of teenagers collectively lost their minds, with one kid screaming, "No! Come Back!" as Black frolicked out of the cinema.

Some people seem to think that Black was trying to stop the chicken jockey trend by warding off popcorn throwing and a general freak out, but if that was his goal, I'm not sure he succeeded. I think Black managed to rile up a whole cinema of teenagers who were probably already hyped right before the movie started.

While I will say that the chicken jockey trend must suck for anyone who works at a cinema and actually has to clean everything up after the riots, it seems like the party line from the cast and crew is that it's pretty funny.

"It’s weird when you’re having too much fun and the cops get called,” director Jared Hess says in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “It’s funny because I think it’s just literally cheering and throwing popcorn, which is so funny to me that cops are getting called for popcorn. Yeah, it’s hilarious. I’ve seen so many funny videos. It’s great, especially when people are climbing on their friends’ shoulders and standing up and cheering for those moments. It’s like this crazy anticipation. But, man, I’m just glad people are making memories with their friends and families."

Director Jared Hess has already said "it'd be amazing" to make a sequel, but now the Warner Bros suits are on their victory lap and have officially confirmed that there will be Another Minecraft Movie. Asked by Deadline whether sequels for A Minecraft Movie and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice were in development, Warner Bros Pictures co-chairman and CEOs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy didn't hesitate.

"Imminently," said De Luca. "The ink might not be dry on the deals yet, but imminently."

"Adding to things we’re excited about, Andy Serkis doing the Gollum film, Drew Goddard writing a new Matrix," adds Abdy. "We’re super excited about Amblin developing with Chris Columbus new entries in the Gremlins and Goonies franchises."

So that's pretty unsurprising, but definitive. The executives also arguably deserve their moment in the sun here, because the Minecraft movie has been a long-term project with several false starts: it may well have turned out a big success, but the road here clearly wasn't without twists and turns.

"No matter what version of the story is written, there’s no bad news here," says De Luca. "Everybody did their jobs incredibly well. The project was here for 12 years, and had trouble getting made. I think Pam and I did our jobs well, recognizing that it should be fast tracked. I think Jesse Ehrman is an unsung hero here. That should be hung from the rafters, how he kept this thing alive for those 12 years, through multiple regimes. That is hard to do. He never didn’t believe in it, and he kept the faith. You could not ask for a better performance from a key executive and a champion of his project.

"And then the final puzzle piece was attaching Legendary, where Mary Parent and Cale Boyter brought it home by folding in Jared Hess and producing the result that we have. Everybody did their jobs. There are many things to celebrate, many people to celebrate. Pam and I will always credit everyone who contributes, including a recently reorganized marketing and distribution team. This was their maiden tentpole voyage, wiping out any doubt that we might miss a step in our ability to mount and deploy a global tentpole. There are heroes all through this story, and all of them should get the credit they deserve. It was a complete win for everyone involved."

I'm not sure what deploying a global tentpole means, but presumably it's something to do with those McDonalds meals.

There are no details yet on when to expect the next Minecraft movie, though it will presumably stick to the same crowd-pleasing template and cast that's proven so successful (and feature an extended chicken jockey sequence). The cast and crew will also, presumably, be returning to their own private Minecraft server, where Jack Black got "super weirdly method" and built a fancy mansion.

But that's exactly what the 2024 Borderlands movie did. It made Tiny Tina a genetically engineered part-alien "chosen one", turned Claptrap a kind of budget Bender who wants to kill all the humans but is programmed not to, and treated the fact Lilith is a siren as a twist to reveal at the end rather than a baseline aspect of her character you might know before walking into the cinema.

Respecting the source material isn't the only way to make a good adaptation, of course. Netflix's Castlevania series had a subset of the fandom up in arms, but it was great. Borderlands blithely changed the core of every character it put on screen, but only to replace them with cliches like "world-weary bounty hunter" rather than anything interesting.

Talking to podcast The Town, via Dark Horizons, director Eli Roth tried to explain exactly what went wrong. He started by discussing the oddity of watching a movie he didn't have final cut on, and which was completed without him—Tim Miller, director of Deadpool, having taken over while Roth moved on to slasher film Thanksgiving—and asking, "am I at the point of my career where I'm going to sit down to watch my own movie that says I wrote and directed it, and I really genuinely don't know what’s going to happen?"

Roth said he's still friends with many of the people involved, but also sounds aware of what a disaster the movie was, saying that he'd only work with the Lionsgate studio again if the circumstances were different.

"I think none of us, none of us anticipated how complicated things were gonna be with COVID," Roth said. "Not just in terms of what we're shooting, but then you have to do pick-up shots or reshoots and you have six people that are all on different sets and every one of those sets is getting shut down because the cities have opened up, and now there's a COVID outbreak and it was just like… we couldn't prep in a room together, I couldn't be with my stunt people, I couldn't do pre-vis, everyone's spread all over the place. You can't prep a movie on that scale over Zoom and I think we all thought we could pull it off and we got our asses handed to us a bit."

Which maybe does explain some of the nonsensical action scenes, but not the rest of the many issues Borderlands had. As Joshua Wolens said in our review, it's not even bad in a fun way. "This is not a film you should ever queue up alongside infamous masterpieces like The Room and Manos: The Hands of Fate. It's just uninspired scene after loosely connected uninspired scene, each populated by a cast of actors who also seem kind of upset about experiencing the Borderlands movie."

Fresh off a role as schoolteacher Harry Senate in the first three seasons of Boston Public, Katt played a subversive take on Han Solo in Obsidian's RPG full of subversive takes on Star Wars. While Atton was a sarcastic smuggler and the pilot on your ship, he turned out to have a secret, dark past—as pretty much every character in a Knights of the Old Republic game is required to by galactic law.

Katt made it work, able to portray both the haunted survivor and the snarky fast-talker—if you play a woman, one of his first lines quotes Anakin in Phantom Menace, before immediately undercutting it as a ridiculous thing to say. (It was 2004, making fun of the Star Wars prequels was in.) Though Atton was his only videogame role, Katt turned in the kind of star performance Hollywood never gave him a shot at, with a chance to reveal vulnerability behind the facade. Depending how you play it, he can become your best friend and leave you feeling like a kind of Jedi Giovanni Ribisi.

Katt also played a street-racing thug named Spike in 1997's Batman & Robin and a SWAT driver in 2008's The Dark Knight—he's the guy who says, "What is that, a bazooka?" That means Katt was possibly the only actor to appear in both Joel Schumacher's camp Batman movies and Christopher Nolan's grim-and-gritty Batman trilogy. There's a fact to save for quiz night.

"Endings are hard. But after four incredible seasons, 'Mythic Quest' is coming to a close," executive producers Megan Ganz, David Hornsby, and Rob McElhenney were quoted as saying. "We're so proud of the show and the world we got to build—and deeply grateful to every cast and crew member who poured their heart into it. To all our fans, thank you for playing with us. To our partners at Apple, thank you for believing in the vision from the very beginning. Because endings are hard, with Apple's blessing we made one final update to our last episode—so we could say goodbye, instead of just game over."

It's a shame the series has to end here, with a season our local Mythic Quest-enjoyer Chris Livingston called "the best it's been since the first". Chris summed it up as "a nimble comedy with a lot of heart, packed with enough gaming references to make nerds smile but not so many that it becomes impenetrable to non-gamers."

Meanwhile, Netflix is out here commissioning a second season of its unwatchable Devil May Cry anime—a show whose theme song is literally Rollin' by Limp Bizkit. That's not a joke, they deliberately subjected people to the song that makes you wish Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith put the wall back up after they were done. That show gets to live on while Mythic Quest dies. It's an unjust world is what I'm saying.

"Let's dance," Netflix says in an announcement post. "Devil May Cry is officially coming back for Season 2!" Although there's no specific date tagged onto this announcement, Netflix does say that it's coming soon.

Now, soon could mean just about anything. Years and years of delays have shifted my interpretation of "soon" from meaning months away to meaning sometime in the distant or not so distant future, who knows? So while I'd like to think that this means we'll be getting the second season before the end of 2025, I'm certainly not holding out hope for a speedy return.

It seems like most fans are excited to see this show renewed for a second season, but there are still more than a few who are unsure whether this show is even worth it, asking: "No bs, is this honestly worth watching?"

I'll admit that some of the CG use is slightly egregious, but it does make way for some of the best animated scenes I could've hoped to see in a Devil May Cry animated show, like Dante's bike fight scene while he's chasing the white rabbit. Otherwise, I can't help but absolutely love Johnny Yong Bosch's performance as Dante. He may not be the canonical choice, but it works for me.

Needless to say, whatever you think of Devil May Cry's first season, this reveal shouldn't come as much of a surprise. In an old interview with IGN, Adi Shankar, Devil May Cry's showrunner and the producer behind other Netflix shows like Castlevania, shared plans for a "multi-season arc".

"It's way too funny," Hess says in an interview with The New York Times. "It’s been a total blast. I’m just laughing my brains out every time someone sends me a new video." I'll admit that some of the videos are really funny, especially the ones where, during the ruckus, someone manages to climb onto their friend's shoulders mimicking the chicken jockey just in time for the grand reveal; now that's dedication.

"Jack says it with such passion," Hess continues. "Everything that comes out of his mouth in the film is spoken with such authority and seriousness, like this is the most important thing anybody has ever heard in their life. I think people just love the craziness of it."

But while some of the videos are funny to watch, I bet they aren't funny to witness in real life. Cinemas all over have been trying to combat chaotic showings of the film, dealing with rowdy and annoying teenagers and then being left to clean up the mess of 50 people's popcorn thrown across the floor and even a live chicken being let loose in the cinema. One cinema had to call the cops after a showing got way too out of control.

There is an element of knowing what you're getting into when you show up to a screening for A Minecraft Movie. While I wouldn't be happy to get popcorn and soda dumped on my head, I'd really only have myself to blame if I decided to watch the film in a cinema right now. Although it doesn't apply to everyone.

Minecraft Movie "Chicken Jockey" Trend Sparking Theater Chaos from r/TikTokCringe

I've seen videos and posts from parents who have described how awful these showings are for their young kids who just want to go to the film, see some creepers, and watch as Jack Black screams about Minecraft items.

But Hess seems to think that these reactions are almost unavoidable: "It’s not something you see all the time, but I think [the chicken jockey] is adorable, and ridiculous, and it can murder you, and that’s something that makes it special."

And to be fair, he may be right. Maybe just the mere sight of the glorious chicken jockey is enough to send us all into a frenzy. Or maybe it's just a weird meme that has taken root and will be played out till its death, only time will tell.

Well, it was a nice idea. The Daily Mail now cites a source saying that Lara Croft's mooted small screen adventures are "not going ahead", while another source is even more unambiguous: the project is "dead." Neither Prime Video nor Waller-Bridge's representatives have commented.

This is not the first time that rumours have swirled around the production, and whether fairly or not the fingers point at Waller-Bridge's scripts, which were apparently delayed for some time and then judged unsuitable for the project. Prime Video signed up Waller-Bridge to a megabucks exclusivity deal in 2019 worth $20 million a year, but since then it has produced no shows or films from the creator.

That deal was made under the aegis of Jennifer Salke, who also greenlit and was overseeing the Tomb Raider project, and was the head of Amazon Studios until just last week. "[Waller-Bridge] grew up playing Lara Croft/Tomb Raider," said Salke in 2023. "We think it's going to be a huge franchise for us."

Puck's Matthew Belloni, in an article focused on Salke's time at Amazon, makes the whole thing sound like a huge mess: "Tomb Raider, which Waller-Bridge has been working on and which Salke was personally overseeing after announcing a series pickup last May, has now gone through two writers rooms and tens of millions of dollars in development costs. There’s still no script."

Amazon is yet to officially confirm the cancellation. Also in development is a new Tomb Raider game from series veterans Crystal Dynamics, which is being developed on Unreal Engine 5 and, hold on to your hats folks, will feature "mind-bending puzzles," a "wide variety of enemies," and be "a new chapter [in] Lara Croft’s story." That has no release date: but at least it's (probably) still going to happen.

A Minecraft Movie does not feature Hoffman, but it turns out the film's all-star cast also took something of a method approach to bringing the game to life: a private server for the whole cast and crew, in which Jack Black decided he had to prove himself a "real Minecrafter."

Going by the experience with my kids, a real Minecrafter is someone who builds pits filled with zombies and then punches villagers in from above. But in Black's case it meant building something beautiful: a mansion atop a mountain, complete with basement art gallery.

"It was so much fun," A Minecraft Movie director Jared Hess told IGN. "Jack [Black] was super-weirdly method with the game. He was in his trailer harvesting lapis lazuli and always building stuff. [He] was geeking out on the game and would come back with ideas. It was a constantly evolving thing where everybody was contributing in their own fun, unique way."

"I had an Xbox in my trailer and I did play because an actor prepares," grins Jack Black. "So I got as many hours as I could on this Minecraft server, which had tons of props from all the different departments.

"The cast and crew on the server were building some insane structures and I wanted to stand out. I wanted everyone to know that I was a real Minecrafter, so I said I was going to find the biggest, highest mountain in this world and build a stairway to Steve and a mansion up on top of that hill. I had a basement in there with an art gallery and... I don't even know if it's still there!"

A Minecraft Movie producer Torfi Frans Ólafsson says that the server is still live. "I kept it up and I extended it for a year," says Ólafsson. "I popped up in there a couple days ago and I said, 'Wait, there's somebody online!' I went in, and there were these two security guards who worked the gate on set and and they're like, 'Hey, welcome!' I said, "You guys are still in here?' and they said, 'Oh, yeah!'"

Sadly there's no screens of Jack Black's magnificent mansion, but then maybe it's best left to the imagination. A Minecraft Movie has proven a hit anyway, and its winning translation of the game's aesthetic can be seen everywhere at the moment (and the director's already making noises about a sequel). The secret to starring in such a film is clear: my dear boy, why don't you try Minecrafting.

The fictional game is called Thronglets, and guess what? It's not so fictional after all. Netflix has released Thronglets for Android and iOS and you can play it right now—if you have a Netflix account, that is.

If you haven't watched Black Mirror Season 7 yet, the episode follows up on a character from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the interactive movie Netflix released in 2018. The Plaything episode isn't interactive, but it features the same game developer from that story, Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), who invites a game journalist from PC Zone magazine to try out a demo of his new game.

But Ritman claims Thronglets isn't a game at all. It looks like a sim where you care for little critters—feed them, bathe them, give them toys to play with—but Ritman insists these critters are actually alive. They're created with code but they're still biological, "living individuals" rather than "obscene puppets like Sonic the Hedgehog," Ritman claims.

I've played Thronglets a bit and it looks and works just like it does in the episode. You can feed the Thronglets apples, wash them with a cloth, give them beachballs to play with, and they'll eventually learn to care for themselves. And, if the conditions are right, they'll multiply. And multiply. And multiply.

I won't say where the episode leads, and I don't know where the game itself goes, but it's pretty cute and probably not dark and ominous and twisted or anything like that.

I think Thronglets may be based on Creatures, a sim game from 1996 which featured odd little animals called Norns that players could feed, play with, and care for, ultimately teaching to take care of themselves.

Creatures used machine learning and neural networks to allow the Norns to learn things, and the game was sound groundbreaking for its time that it influenced genuine AI research. When you're done with Thronglets, you can check out Creatures on Steam.

This time around there are a few game-centric episodes: one deals with AI in a sim game that might not be quite as artificial as it seems, another returns us to space-based MMO Infinity from Season 4, and one episode deals with something we all constantly use and deeply dread: streaming subscription services.

Plus, you can even see someone playing Balatro in one scene in Season 7, which makes sense: Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker called the deckbuilder "possibly the most addictive thing ever created."

Cancel anytime

The most relatable tech nightmare begins in the episode "Common People," where grade-school teacher Amanda (Rashida Jones) and welder Mike (Chris O'Dowd) are a humble but happy suburban couple until their lives are upended by a serious medical event. Amanda needs brain surgery, but offering the only real and affordable chance for success is a startup called Rivermind that will stream some of her brain functions from their cloud-based servers. For a monthly fee.

We subscribe to everything these days: smartphone plans, streaming services, apps, music, news websites, videogames. It can be legitimately difficult just to buy something: it took me ages to find a fitness tracker that didn't require a monthly sub, and when I had a plumber come to install a new bathroom fixture recently, he told me now offers a monthly service subscription.

We're all well-versed in the pitfalls of these subscriptions, like sudden price hikes, different tiers of service, and that infuriating moment when we realize, "Wait, I'm paying for this subscription, so why the hell do I have to watch advertisements?" Now apply all that stress to your brain instead of your phone, TV, or game library. It's an unsettling thought (especially if that thought is being streamed into your head).

There are obviously benefits to streaming services both in this episode and in life—Amanda would be in a coma if not for Rivermind (at least here in the US, where you can't get life-saving medical procedures or even routine medications without bankrupting yourself). I complain about monthly subs but I still subscribe to a bunch of them so I can listen to any song ever made or any movie ever released without having to go hunt down a physical copy in a store.

But the episode—the best of the six this season—is a pointed reminder of how quickly we've gone from owning the things we pay for to renting them a month at a time, and how just to live our lives we're relying more and more on distant servers controlled by megacorporations more than happy to squeeze every dollar they can out of us.

Simulation nation

Another episode, "Plaything," takes us back to the 1990s as a young games journalist working for PC Zone magazine (as show creator Charlie Brooker did) is invited to preview a new game from Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), the developer we met in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. (Note: apart from Poulter's appearance, this episode isn't a really Bandersnatch follow-up as we'd hoped, and it's not an interactive pick-a-path episode like Bandersnatch was.)

Ritman's new game isn't actually a game, he claims. It's called Thronglets and though it looks like it's a creature simulation, Ritman claims the critters on the screen are actually alive. "They're not some obscene puppets, like Sonic the Hedgehog," he says. "These are living individuals" created with code.

The cute pixelated creatures walk around in a simulated nature preserve multiplying and sometimes singing. The journalist realizes the Thronglets are trying to communicate with him, and after scavenging some gear like an Atari Jaguar, a Quickcam, and a Sound Blaster sound card (it's fun to see all this throwback hardware again), he upgrades his rig so he can talk to them directly. His interest in these creatures quickly turns to obsession, but if your Sims were really alive, wouldn't you be even more consumed with them than you already are?

Thronglets might be based on sims like 1996's Creatures, which featured little animals called Norns players could pet, feed, play with, and teach to take care of themselves. The Norns would communicate with little noises, similar to the Thronglet's singing, and Creatures used machine learning and neural networks to allow the creatures to learn behaviors, making it a precursor to today's AI research. (It's even on Steam.)

Unfortunately this episode can't really live up to its setup, and it's pretty much all setup. The idea of the sims in our games being actually alive is an interesting one, especially when they can grow and learn, but it's not particularly well explored here. It's great fun seeing lots of old hardware and references to games like 1994's Magic Carpet (in the episode the reviewer says he gave it a 93%, though apparently the real PC Zone gave it a 96%) but even Peter Capaldi playing an older version of the games journo can't make this episode memorable.

Engage

The biggest draw of the season is probably the follow-up to the Black Mirror Season 4 episode "USS Callister," in which a masochistic game developer (played by Jesse Plemons) made digital clones of his coworkers using their DNA and inserted them into his space-based MMO so he could abuse them.

In Season 7 sequel "USS Callister: Into Infinity," the starship crew, captained by Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti), find themselves in dire straits as the game they're living in has been heavily monetized and requires credits just to use their hyperdrive. Since they're not actual players but are living in the game's universe, they're targeted for deletion by the game's sleazy and greedy CEO James Walton, played again by Jimmi Simpson.

Most of the episode is carried by the great performances of Milioti and Simpson, who play dual roles as the real world Cole and Walton and their digital clones inside the game. But the movie-length episode (it's 90 minutes) just doesn't have enough to sustain it other than a few laughs. A lot more could have been done with the premise of real people trying to survive inside an MMO, but most of the episode takes place outside the game in the less-interesting real world.

The other episodes of Season 7 I hate to describe as "fine," but they're fine: Paul Giammati plays a man exploring his painful past through photographs while assisted by an AI guide, Issa Rae is a modern day actor inserted (again, with AI) into an old film so it can be updated for re-release, and Siena Kelly is a chef who starts experiencing the Mandela Effect to a troubling degree when a former classmate resurfaces in her life.

Like Season 6, most of these episodes don't feel like they're really foreshadowing the future when it comes to technology. The series relies heavily on its "Experiencer Disk," a recurring gadget that you stick to your temple that instantly transports you into a virtual world where pretty much anything can happen, and that always winds up feeling more like fantasy than science fiction.

But just because the show has lost some of the impact and weight of the earlier seasons, they're still worth streaming to one of your black mirrors: at least until Netflix can beam them right into our heads.

"We approached season two with the goal of creating something we could be proud of," executive producer Craig Mazin said (via The Hollywood Reporter).

"The end results have exceeded even our most ambitious goals, thanks to our continued collaboration with HBO and the impeccable work of our unparalleled cast and crew. We look forward to continuing the story of The Last of Us with season three!"

HBO executive vice president Francesca Orsi added to the plaudits: "It can't be overemphasized how proud HBO is for the outstanding achievement we believe the second season of The Last of Us is. Craig, Neil [Druckmann}, Carolyn [Strauss] and the entire executive producer team, cast and crew have delivered a masterful follow-up and we're thrilled to carry the power of Craig and Neil's storytelling into what we know will be an equally moving and extraordinary third season."

That's pretty big praise for a show that hasn't actually aired yet, but critical reviews have been largely positive: Slashfilm said The Last of Us Season 2 "sets a new standard for every videogame adaptation to follow in its wake," while Metro reassured fans that they "will not be disappointed" by the second season.

The Los Angeles Times was a little more restrained in its take, saying that "like any continuation of a fantasy/sci-fi franchise, the second season cannot match the world-building revelations of the first"; The Verge, on the other hand, says the second season "does an excellent job of rendering some of the game’s most touching moments ... while also putting Joel and Ellie’s story into the larger context of this world," and, notably, "ends at a place that nicely sets up season three."

That sounds pretty solid to me, and I imagine HBO executives have to be pretty happy about it as well, although I'm pretty sure they didn't wait for reviews to drop before hastily signing the contracts for the third season. Sometimes you have to roll the dice on these things—like, for instance, when you have a hot property with well-loved actors that people are vocally eager for more of. That helps!

First things first, though: The first episode of The Last of Us season 2 will debut on April 13, and will continue weekly from there through its full seven-episode length. If you want to watch but aren't otherwise interested in going whole-hog on MAX, PC Gamer's TV mastermind Chris Livingston has some good advice on how to minmax your streaming subscriptions to get the most for the least—and in the meantime, The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered in now available on PC, so you can just go play that, too.

As we reported earlier this week, young audiences have made a thing out of overreacting to a scene in which Jack Black shouts "chicken jockey" at a baby zombie riding a chicken, a phenomenon you'll very occasionally see in Minecraft, the game.

It's not the only Minecraft Movie moment being met with raucous behavior, but it's definitely the focal point, with shouting, screaming, and popcorn showers following the line in a number of clips posted to social media, including a couple that ended with police escorting kids out of the theater.

The chaos hasn't stopped now that we're past the opening weekend. The latest video to cross my social feeds (apparently uploaded first to TikTok, embedded on X below because the TikTok embed isn't working) shows an actual, live chicken being wielded in a theater.

"It's safe to say we got kicked out," the uploader added on top of the video.

Young people are under a lot of pressure in this unstable world, which isn't a good excuse to bring a live chicken to a screening of A Minecraft Movie, but I do my best to be understanding.

Please be kind to animals. They are not videogame creatures.

And be kind to theater employees, too.

(Sorry for mentioning you after chickens, theater employees, it's just that a chicken is much less likely to be encountered in a movie theater than a movie theater employee, and we might need to set a low bar to start with.)

According to Puck, Matt Berry, best known for his role as Laszlo Cravensworth in the vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows, was originally meant to play Steve in A Minecraft Movie. Unfortunately, this didn't end up happening due to scheduling issues. At the time of filming for A Minecraft Movie, Berry was already busy shooting the last season of his vampire series.

Despite not getting to take on the mantle of Steve, Matt Berry still does make a small appearance in A Minecraft Movie. I won't spoil anything here as it's a neat little cameo, but I will say that Berry was still able to steal the show, even though he was only on screen for a few minutes.

Jack Black may not have been my first pick for Steve, but I can't deny he's still a good fit for the film, if not only for how much he seems to love Minecraft.

One of the biggest talking points during the marketing for A Minecraft Movie was how much Minecraft Jack Black was playing as he was shooting the film. Apparently, he became obsessed with lapis lazuli and spent most of his breaks mining for the ore: "He was in his trailer anytime he had a break—he was just slaying it in the Overworld,” director Jared said. "[The producer and Minecraft senior director Torfi Frans Olafsson] put together a special server just for the crew. Jack got obsessed with searching for lapis lazuli, as he calls it. I mean, every day, it was like, I'd pop in there to go over the scene in the morning, and he would be dressed as Steve playing the game. It was kind of a surreal thing to behold."

But no matter how much Minecraft Jack Black plays, I can't help but mourn a reality that never was: Matt Berry and his extraordinary line deliveries of Minecraft items.

Physicist Hugh Everett III first proposed the idea of "many worlds" in his 1957 PhD thesis. It later became a cornerstone of the multiverse theory, the idea that there are multiple universes, each with its own laws of physics and different realities. Meaning, somewhere out there in the infinite expanse of space, beyond our comprehension, there's a universe where Matt Berry ended up playing Steve in A Minecraft Movie—it's not much, but it's something to hang on to.

"Yeah, there were a ton of fun sequences we wanted to do," director Jared Hess says in an interview with TechRadar. "[Popular Minecraft YouTuber] Mumbo Jumbo, who's a redstone genius, was working on a great scene that we just couldn't do.

"We had a sequence that involved a giant Piglin robot, which was a Trojan horse-type thing that worked via redstone. I storyboarded it, we had full animatics of it, and it was a really hilarious scene. But, we just weren't able to do it."

Mumbo Jumbo is a Minecraft YouTuber who specialises in creating redstone builds. Recently, he managed to make mechanical cogs and gears in vanilla Minecraft (no mods, just pure redstone) as well as a massive redstone fan.

These builds are all incredibly impressive. I love playing around with redstone, and have even gone to Mumbo Jumbo for inspiration for builds multiple times, but I could never come up with anything he makes on my own, my brain just isn't hardwired like that.

So it makes complete sense that when Hess wanted an expert to create some extraordinary redstone booby traps, he would turn to Mumbo Jumbo. "It would've been super fun to have that Mumbo Jumbo-designed sequence," Hess says. "But ultimately it didn't work out. He designed a bunch of crazy booby traps for us as well, but we couldn't make those work in the confines of our movie, too."

But even if Mumbo Jumbo's sequence didn't end up making it into the film, Hess and others working on A Minecraft Movie still tried to ensure that all the builds that were present worked just the way they should. "Everything we designed for the film, we wanted to make sure that you could actually go and make in the game," Hess continues. "So, even Steve's Lava Chicken Shack and all of those things, we'd be like 'Gosh, are we sure we can do this? Does it work? Okay, let's go to the game and build it right now. Right, it checks out. It's bulletproof."

So I guess that means my next job is to make a working Lava Chicken Shack in my Minecraft world. It's only small, so it shouldn't be too hard, plus it looks like it uses a pretty basic redstone pattern. And at the end of it all, I'll get some lava chicken, what's not to love?

There's an enormous amount to unpack about Herobrine's story over the years, but the short version is that he's supposed to be a ghost that haunts the worlds of singleplayer games, and the subject of endless creepypasta accounts of how he's interfered with players' worlds. Herobrine looks like Steve, who I guess we could call the main character of Minecraft, except for one detail: blank white eyes.

A Minecraft Movie features what seems to be an unmistakable nod to Herobrine and I'm going to explain what happens so, if you want to see the movie spoiler-free, maybe stop here.

Halfway through A Minecraft Movie the character Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen) meets an Enderman at the Woodland Mansion, who casts some voodoo and makes Henry have visions of Steve (Jack Black) saying nasty things to him. But the version of Steve in this scene has glowing white eyes.

Given that this is a movie that's been made in co-operation with Mojang and features endless in-jokes and Easter eggs about the game, this seems like a fairly obvious nod to the ultimate Minecraft urban legend. But Mojang Studios’ creative director Torfi Frans Olafsson, a producer on the movie, claims it's unintentional (thanks, GR+).

"It’s super strange that all of their eyes were supposed to be purple," says Olafsson, "but when it was rendered one of the characters' eyes kept coming out white in the final rendered frames so we wound up keeping it like that, because the VFX studio ran out of time."

Hmm. Far be it from me to question someone who actually worked on the movie but this just doesn't seem plausible, and Olafsson clearly likes teasing about Herobrine specifically. In response to someone asking about Herobrine being in a possible sequel, Olafsson jokes: "I think Herobrine was patched out of the game a very long time ago. Repeatedly."

So call me a cynic but it seems like this is a Herobrine nod that, in deference to the actual myths and backstory of the character, the creators have decided is best left unacknowledged. It just got in there somehow. The VFX people ran out of time. Herobrine wasn't supposed to be in A Minecraft Movie and yet, somehow, there he is.

We'll see: perhaps the white eyes will be corrected for the streaming release, but I'm betting not. A Minecraft Movie has proven to be a tremendous success so far, even if the film itself is a bit of a mixed bag, so a sequel (and another Herobrine cameo) feels like an inevitability. The director himself says he'd love some more money to make a sequel: "It'd be amazing!"

"Sometimes you show up to a movie and you read the script and they haven't cast your lover yet and then you show up and you're like 'I don't know if I really want to make out with him'," Jennifer Coolidge says in an interview with BBC Radio 1. "But when I saw what Nitwit looked like and what Bret McKenzie looked like and the combination of the two. I mean, it was just like fire."

While Steve and the rest of the crew are trying to save the Overworld, Jennifer Coolidge, who plays vice principal Marlene, stumbles across Nitwit, a Minecraft villager who strayed through the Overworld portal and straight into a road, and then into the bonnet of Marlene's car.

After trying to convince him not to sue her because "people just love to sue me when I hit them with my Jeep Grand Cherokee," Marlene settles things by offering to take Nitwit out to dinner as a way to say sorry and avoid court. What precedes is a surprisingly wholesome love story as Marlene and Nitwit get to know each other better.

While the chemistry is clearly undeniable, we can't give all the credit to Nitwit—some of it has to go to his on-set performer, Bret McKenzie. Nitwit's head was CGI, and McKenzie wore a block costume while on set. "He was inside a box, I don't know what he was doing in there," Coolidge says.

"It was a lot because Bret is—this is not very nice to say—more attractive than Nitwit," Coolidge tells Digital Spy. "Bret McKenzie's a genius, it's hard to do a performance through a cardboard box and still have you laughing, but he was able to do it," Coolidge told Digital Spy.

There were a few scenes in A Minecraft Movie which genuinely made me laugh, but Coolidge's scenes with Nitwit were the most consistently funny in the whole film. They were scattered in sparingly, but were a real highlight, so much so that I was left wanting more, especially after the outlandish mid-credit scene.

Before A Minecraft Movie launched, Valkyrae was all set to join a bunch of other streamers in getting a short cameo in the film, but in a recent stream she revealed that her appearance had been cut.

"I'm not gonna touch too much on it," said the streamer, but she confirmed that she would have gotten roughly equal screentime that other people making cameos got: "which is like 30 seconds" or so.

Alas, it was not to be, and Valkyrae didn't say why. She did seem to suggest there was a behind-the-scenes fracas though: "I would much rather not have that 30 seconds than be sued. So it’s all good, okay?" After all, she continued "It really was a wonderful 10 days in New Zealand for that 30 seconds… I feel like things could have been so much worse, you know what I mean? That’s all I’m going to say about it."

And that's all you get, besides a brief follow-up from Valkyrae that "It’s not even Minecraft. It’s not even their fault," that her cameo was cut. Still, it's worth remembering that last September, Valkyrae made headlines when she called out Minecraft Movie star Jason Momoa for behaviour she claims she saw on set.

"I just saw him, like, mistreat some of the crew and it was pretty disappointing," the streamer said last year. "He was just angry, like really mad and, like, yelling. So I was like, man, this is not a good work environment. Like, I would not be happy working under these conditions… so yeah, I would probably have to say that was probably the worst, like, celebrity thing I've seen."

Could that have poisoned the relationship between Valkyrae and Warner Bros, leading to her cameo getting axed from the final film? It seems likely to me, especially with the streamer seemingly relieved to have dodged some kind of legal bullet. But that's speculation on my part: Valkyrae's not saying and I doubt Warner Bros will be enthusiastic to dredge the matter back up either. Nevertheless, I've reached out to Warner for comment on this story, and will update if I hear back.

A chicken jockey is a baby zombie riding a chicken, a rare occurrence in Minecraft. Thanks to TikTok and whatever it is that compels humans to engage in weird collective behavior, the part of A Minecraft Movie where Jack Black sees a chicken jockey and shouts "chicken jockey!" has become a thing, and over the weekend kids in some theaters went wild for the line, shouting, recording with their phones, and launching popcorn into the airspace above the other theater goers.

@salesmenpod

♬ original sound - Salesmen: After Hours

At the end of the video above, police are seen escorting a group of kids out of the theater. It's unclear what they did that the others didn't.

As actor Roger Clark—voice of Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2—observed, we're not yet a week into A Minecraft Movie's theater run and it's already developed a Rocky Horror Picture Show-style audience participation tradition.

"High school kids and adolescents alike screaming random Jack Black lines because of YouTube shorts and TikToks," the actor said on X. "Never seen anything like that before."

Looks like the teens have decided to remind Millennials and Gen X that while we might've pioneered a life of ironic-yet-obsessive pop culture appreciation, they were born into it. And they were raised on Minecraft, too, so it's no surprise that A Minecraft Movie had the biggest ever opening weekend for a videogame adaptation.

The video above shows one of the more dramatic Minecraft Movie eruptions, but they were all over social media feeds this past weekend, and it isn't just the chicken jockey scene getting a reaction.

In another video with police involvement, embedded below, an officer says that a group "body slammed" a theater employee. (Theater employees are understandably not loving the situation.)

@hubert_762

♬ Intervallo II - Ennio Morricone

Here are a few more videos of the weekend's Minecraft frenzy:

@eddie_vikings13

♬ original sound - eddie_vikings13

@ickysnotbubble_

♬ QKThr - Aphex Twin

In its opening weekend, A Minecraft Movie made $301 million worldwide and $157 million domestically, the biggest opening weekend ever for a videogame adaptation. To put this in perspective, The Super Mario Bros. Movie was the former highest-grossing videogame movie, debuting with $146.4 million domestically over a three-day weekend.

Although The Super Mario Bros. Movie had a smaller budget of $100 million while A Minecraft Movie had $150 million, it doesn't make this achievement any less impressive. This also means that after its debut weekend, there's a decent chance that it is already profitable for Warner Bros. But like I said before, I saw this outcome from a mile away.

My first thought when I watched A Minecraft Movie was how it felt like it had been made in a lab to be marketable. It's utterly vanilla (pardon the pun), the story is drama-free, there are no greater moral issues, and the cast has been swept clean of any controversy, at the expense of one comedy rock duo. It's the perfect controversy-free kids' movie.

It also had a pretty impressive marketing campaign. Everywhere I look, I see photos of the Minecraft McDonald's meals or people talking about which little figure is the best collectable. And trying to win over fans of the game by just talking about how much lapis lazuli Jack Black mined whilst filming the blockbuster repeatedly obviously worked on some level.

But A Minecraft Movie has also managed to appeal to more than just kids. Despite clearly being made for those who grew up with TikTok, with Jack Black periodically yelling the names of Minecraft items and Jason Momoa's entire performance being a sequence of six-second bits and jokes.

Talking to the producer and director, it was clear that everyone involved with making A Minecraft Movie was aware of just how difficult it was going to be to appeal to more than one target audience. To that end, director Jared Hess and producer Torfi Ólafssonon decided to try and have as much fun with making the film as possible, hoping that their love of the game would shine through for long-time players as well as for newer fans. "The key to it was to be fun," Ólafssonon said. "To not take ourselves too seriously, but take the game very seriously."

And fair play to them because they clearly hit the nail on the head when it came to the concept, marketing, and execution of A Minecraft Movie, seeing how well it's done in its opening weekend. While I may not have absolutely loved A Minecraft Movie, which is reflected in my review, there's no denying that this is exactly what the masses love: head-empty fun.

In an interview with GamesRadar+ director Jared Hess was asked whether he'd be interested in making a sequel to which, unsurprisingly, the answer is a big fat yes.

"Oh, it'd be so much fun," says Hess. "Yeah I mean, look, the world's infinite, so many amazing mods and characters and biomes we haven't explored yet, so it'd be amazing."

It's certainly true that, after over a decade of additions with many more to come, Minecraft is mind-bogglingly vast, and with that aesthetic the sky's the limit. The movie follows four regular humans who get sucked into the world of Minecraft and have to rely on the help of in-game character Steve (Jack Black) to survive.

It mostly takes place in the familiar Minecraft overworld of grass, trees and caves (with a village of course) and, barring sections set in the Nether, doesn't feature many of the game's other biomes. And there are plenty of iconic characters, such as witches, that didn't get an outing this time around.

The Nether and the Piglins that run it are A Minecraft Movie's bad guys. "I'm obsessed with the Piglins," says Hess. "I think they're super gnarly and funny and gross and strange, and I love their weird barbarian culture. They're cannibals. They're obsessed with gold, and I just thought that they would be such fun villains, but they've also got a unique story."

PC Gamer's Elie Gould found a lot to like in A Minecraft Movie's recreation of the game's world, even if the tone is understandably kid-oriented: "A Minecraft Movie probably isn't the serious storytelling that some players want, but it'll make you laugh a couple of times, and at least in my case, it's given me the bi-annual itch to play Minecraft again." My favourite part of the launch by far though was star turn Jason Momoa promoting the movie by telling everyone he doesn't let his kids play games.

"We don't have a TV," Momoa told Deadline on the red carpet recently. "My son doesn't even have a phone—he's 16 and doesn't have a phone. We're different, dude. Sorry, man." Which, honestly? Probably a pretty smart move as parenting goes. I don't envy the poor, doomed zoomers and gen alphas out there today growing up in the poison swamp of social media, AI slop, and sugar-sweet algorithmic brainrot. "[Smartphones] are new to the world," says Momoa. "Everyone was doing just fine. You and I didn't grow up with phones, no one told me what to do—I had to find it."

I don't fault Momoa for wanting to keep his own kids out of all that, but I do find it quite funny to trumpet the philosophy on the red carpet for a film that will pretty much live or die depending on how many screen-obsessed tweens it can pull into movie theatres. Maybe he's trying a digital equivalent of making them smoke the whole pack.

Regardless, Momoa continues: "Because he's gonna be 18, he's gonna have a phone, he's gonna be out of the house and he can explore the world after that." Which does make it sound a bit like the Hollywood star is raising his teen son in some kind of replica of The Village, but that's probably just an issue of phrasing. "I just want them to use their creativity in a different way, so we do a lot of other things."

What other things? Momoa doesn't really say, although he does mention that he and the family "Watch movies together, and that's beautiful." Presumably not on a TV, though.

A Minecraft Movie releases properly tomorrow, April 4, but you might not want to rush and see it. Our Elie Gould scored the movie a respectable-but-not-remarkable 65% in their Minecraft Movie review, saying it "manages to show off the beautiful vistas, creative fun, and the wacky adventures that Minecraft is known for, but its story is seriously lacking."

PC Gamer got to attend an advance screening, so your first step should be to go read our review of A Minecraft Movie. If you want a bit of shorthand, no problem: Elie says it hits a lot of the right notes for fans of the game, especially younger players, and says "this movie thrives when it's simply being a relatable Minecraft experience while also showing off just how limitless Minecraft's world is."

It's lacking in some other ways, however: "Unfortunately, this film isn't just about gazing at vistas and watching its characters make cool builds," Elie says. "The problems with this film lie in its character development and rushed story."

On the plus side, Elie declares that it's "worth it just to see chicken jockey."

But hey, PC Gamer isn't the only one to who got an early look at the potential blockbuster. Here's what other critics have to say about A Minecraft Movie. Opinions mostly run the gamut from "unimaginative" to "okay," but there are a few genuinely positive things being said here and there:

• Gamesradar, 3/5: "...an entertaining fantasy adventure that makes light work of what might appear to be unpromising source material."
• IGN, 6/10: It's "Okay," and "a surprisingly specific and funny comic spin on A Minecraft Movie’s kid-friendly adventure, especially in its less antic first half."
• GameSpot: "A Minecraft Movie is exactly what you think it is based on its trailers."
• Polygon: The film "...isn’t actively boring and remains baseline entertaining," but "fails to capture any of the joy and adventure" of the game.
• Engadget: "It's good, actually."

Gaming sites aren't the only ones who've seen and reviewed A Minecraft Movie. Did you know there are movie reviews on other sites these days, too? Amazing. Here's what a few of them thought of A Minecraft Movie.

• AVClub: "A mix of blatant formula and complete oddity, the film is a failed recipe with plenty of seasoning."
• Entertainment Weekly, B: It's a "surprisingly well-crafted adaptation."
• The Wrap: "It is what it is. It is what it's supposed to be."
• Mashable: "It’s a good primer for the game that never feels like homework."
• Variety: A "a flaky, spirited, low-hijinks quest comedy."
• NYT: "...so-dumb-it’s-sort-of-fun."
• The Hollywood Reporter: "...it fails to spark the imagination"

It's obvious that A Minecraft Movie is predominantly for kids, with all of Jack Black's yelling, big explosions, and wholesome humour. But the director and producer didn't want to completely cut out older players from enjoying this film, and so had the tricky task of making this film more appealing to older players.

"I think the biggest thing just for all of us was to have fun," director Jared Hess tells PC Gamer. "We all had a personal relationship with the game, and so when we put together the movie, we all wanted to bring all of those details that we love about the game and celebrate them. We thought if we do that, if we are true and authentic about our love for the game and these totally unique, iconic characters and the world and the themes and everything, it'll all work."

There are enough fun Minecraft references to make it clear that the people working on this film care about the game. But if spotting a Technoblade tribute and watching a Minecraft Legends fight play out wasn't enough to convince you, then hearing about how much Minecraft Jack Black played while on set should set you at ease.

"We'd have endless conversations about how to represent the mobs, the biomes, and what stories to tell in what locations, and how to get the characters out of trouble and into trouble in the most Minecraft way possible," producer Torfi Ólafssonon says. "I've been playing the game for 13 years, and have been working for Mojang for seven years, and I've played Minecraft a lot with my kids.

"So I tried not to just use my experience as an adult at Mojang, but also see [the film] through the eyes of my kids. What they like, what kind of humor they like, and what they think is engaging about the game, but it was certainly a challenge."

A Minecraft Movie may predominantly be for kids, but I think there are enough cool scenes, pretty vistas, and lore-accurate critters around to appeal to some older players as well. If you love Minecraft, then this film is good enough in that it lets you look at the Overworld in a different light.

"We poured as much love and heart as we could into everything, and that's all that you can really do," Hess continues. "You're never going to be able to take the infinite expanse of the game and put it all into a finite hour and a half. So you have to take some swings and really curate and pick your favorite things."

"I think the key to it was to be fun," Ólafssonon continues. "To not take ourselves too seriously, but take the game very seriously."

Minecraft is all about creativity. Whatever you can think up, you can make in this game, whether that be a completely automated sorting system, which I managed to cook up over the pandemic, or a fully functional PC. Anything's possible, and that freedom is Minecraft's greatest trait, so it tracks that A Minecraft Movie would focus on how important it is never to stop creating.

"People say, 'No, I'm not creative' or 'I'm not an artist', or 'I can't do that', but deep inside all of us, there is still that spark," producer Torfi Ólafssonon tells me during an interview. "What this movie is trying to talk about is that we shouldn't let anything stifle that spark and we should enjoy making things."

In the film Jack Black's character Steve temporarily gives up on his dreams to mine and be creative as he grows up, but eventually goes back to the mines and finds a portal to the Overworld where he can have fun creating all sorts of things like statues of his dog Dennis, working ferris wheels, or houses made entirely out of pink wool. Then there's Henry, a young inventor who's bullied for messing up on his inventions. Despite a couple of setbacks, he also learns to have fun and that failing at first is usually an important part of making something new.

"It presented a really amazing opportunity to be able to tell a story within that world where our characters also have to be creative to survive," director Jared Hess tells us. "It's hard to be creative in life, and you're judged, and you risk failure and embarrassment and all of those things that come with being an artist. But to see our characters navigate that and come out better because of it and because they had the courage to be creative was super fun."

Hess and Ólafssonon discussed some of the harder moments on set, and how creating A Minecraft Movie wasn't always super straightforward and fun. "There were definite moments where we thought 'This is probably not happening' or 'This is all going the wrong way'," Ólafssonon says.

"It was a long process," Hess continues. "I came on board right before the pandemic started. So much of the development of the script and everything happened then, and I think everything that was going on in the world was hard for everyone. But it was such an amazing opportunity. I mean, here's this just incredible game. It's the biggest video game of all time."

But everything worked out in the end, and the finished product is a pretty fun watch. It may not be the Minecraft film that some older fans may have wanted, those who perhaps were looking for something slightly more serious and nuanced, but it still does the Overworld and Nether justice.

With this in mind, Hess stressed how crucial perseverance is: "Never stop playing. Never give up the spark. Never stop being playful or creative, and do it just for the sake of being creative. Not for an end, like you're trying to achieve something. We should always hold on to that. Never stop playing."

"People were playing the game a lot when we weren't shooting, in the evenings, and over weekends," producer Torfi Ólafssonon tells me. "Everyone talked about the game between shots. There was this sense of unbound, collaborative creativity and adventure, which you experience when you are playing with friends on a Minecraft server."

The vibe of working with friends towards a shared goal on a Minecraft server is unmatched. I've created mutant chicken farms in Tekkit, survived for years on a shared skyblocks server, and created a massive white room underground, which we then proceeded to fill with endermen trapped in boats. You know, good Minecraft fun.

"The fact that we were all there together in New Zealand, the set designers, the choreographers, it reminded me of the vibe of being in an indie game studio," Ólafssonon continues.

There are a ton of cool moments in A Minecraft Movie, which make it clear that the people working on it do have a special love for Minecraft. Other than showing off cool areas like redstone mines and the Woodland Mansion, I noticed a nice little nod to Technoblade as a little pig wearing a crown waddled into shot. It may seem small, but I'm sure that's a moment which will mean a lot to Technoblade fans and longtime Minecraft players.

Seeing the core group of characters travel through the Overworld, crafting cool weapons, and encountering things like iron golems, villagers, and the piglins for the first time was also a lot of fun. But my favourite moment had to be the chase scene in which Henry, Garett, and Steve all jump off a cliff to escape a group of piglins, only to fly off through the mountains with the help of elytra. It was the best depiction of what it would be like actually to use these wings that I could've hoped for.

If nothing else, A Minecraft Movie has brought on that bi-annual itch to return to that one unfinished Minecraft world and carry on my hard work.

But this theological statement is actually from one of this generation's greatest minds: Jack Black in A Minecraft Movie. It sums up the core message of this film: No matter how difficult it is to create something, hard work and practice always pay off; a very Minecraft sentiment.

Instead of trying to become the new canon Minecraft experience, A Minecraft Movie decides to focus on a few individuals and their experiences within the game. Jack Black's version of Steve isn't the Steve; he's just a Steve. And while there is a story in the form of the Piglins trying to get the precious orb back from Steve and friends to complete their domination of the Overworld, this is more of a vessel for the core cast to explore and interact with Minecraft.

The best parts of the film (other than all of Jennifer Coolidge's scenes) were all the times when characters interacted with Minecraft just like any other player would. During a zombie/skeleton invasion on the first night, Henry, the young protagonist, manages to create a fortress to protect himself and his friends from the unfriendly mobs. Later on, we get to see more builds that Jack Black, aka Steve, made during his time in the Overworld. There's a working Ferris wheel, a booby-trapped diamond mine, and of course a fitting tribute to his trusty wolf dog, Dennis.

It's a very human experience to point at something familiar and go, "I do that!" which is probably why I enjoyed seeing the Dennis statue or Steve, Garrett, and Henry fly through canyons with elytra whilst getting chased by a swarm of Ghast-riding Piglins so much. Playing Minecraft is a very relatable experience, something that binds all of us who play. Everyone's hidden in a hole or a little dirt hut on their first night, celebrated once they cracked their first redstone build, or aspired to build the magnificent diamond block house. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that this movie thrives when it's simply being a relatable Minecraft experience while also showing off just how limitless Minecraft's world is.

Unfortunately, this film isn't just about gazing at vistas and watching its characters make cool builds. The problems with this film lie in its character development and rushed story.

It ender drags-on a bit

From the start, you can see that one of the issues that the creators had to overcome was how to get their characters from point A (the real world) to point B (Minecraft's Overworld) as fast as possible. There would've been a couple of nifty quick ways to do so, one of which being a Jumanji-like scenario in which Steve would've been swept into the Overworld via some old grey PC, later to be followed by the rest of the core group.

But instead, Steve decides to break into an abandoned mine, breaking some poor man's ankles when he sidesteps him into oblivion on the way in. This is where Steve finds the orb and the earth crystal, which he combines to create a gateway to the Overworld.

After making a couple of cool builds, Steve gets robbed of his orb by the Piglins and their leader, but to save the Overworld from complete destruction, Steve hands the orb to Dennis to hide in the real world.

It's at this point where we're introduced to the rest of the group, and where the film really struggles with finding the right pace. Most of the character introductions are rushed to get to the Overworld quicker, except for Garrett, a pro retro gamer, who got an odd amount of backstory for someone who I think was meant to be a secondary character or at the very least behind Henry.

Because of this, most of the characters don't feel massively rounded out. Occasionally, there'd be a moment or two where there'd be some attempt at character progression, only for it to be cut short to retain the attention of its younger audience.

But to be fair, A Minecraft Movie never marketed itself as a film with a ton of layers, so I can't really be angry that it yells about crafting tables instead of providing a deep character study.

A decent block-buster

Once I looked past some of these pitfalls and just decided to enjoy this movie for what it is, some good light-hearted fun, I started to enjoy my time with it a bit more. Instead of dwelling on why the Piglins didn't attack Steve straight away as he had no gold armour on, I instead found myself smiling at fun references to creeper farms and a lovely little Technoblade tribute.

It's obvious that this film is really meant for the younger Minecraft playerbase rather than those who played the game back when it first released, with Jack Black regularly yelling out the name of items like flint and steel or crafting table. But there's just enough cool references and some funny jokes to help you sit through the movie.

Jennifer Coolidge's scenes, which take place in the real world as she romances a lost Minecraft villager, were the most consistently funny scenes in the entire movie, and her story arc alongside the lost villager made me laugh way more than I thought it would. I'm not going to lie, her mid-credits scene made my day.

So, to older fans of Minecraft, I'd say go check out A Minecraft Movie if you're up for some casual fun and want to check out a pretty impressive visualisation of the Overworld and Nether. A Minecraft Movie probably isn't the serious storytelling that some players want, but it'll make you laugh a couple of times, and at least in my case, it's given me the bi-annual itch to play Minecraft again.

The outspoken creator of co-op hit Split Fiction was responding to a question about the film adaptation of his 2021 game, It Takes Two. The deal to turn it into a movie was announced several years ago, but since then we've heard nothing—and even Fares says he's in the dark about the status of the It Takes Two film adaptation. "I don't know what's going on."

That might explain why Fares doesn't sound so optimistic about another movie adaptation of one of his games. This time it's Split Fiction, which was the subject of a bidding war for the film rights a few weeks ago. But just because a game is tagged to become a movie doesn't mean it will ever happen.

"You know what I say? I believe it when I see it, because nothing has happened yet," Fares said during a chat with Variety this week, adding "it would be nice if it happened, but again, I'll believe it when I see it. Sometimes there’s a lot of talks, but nothing happens. So we will see."

Deals to turn games into movies seem to happen on a near-daily basis these days: Sony is making a Helldivers 2 movie, a second reboot of Resident Evil is in the works just four years after the first reboot, Magic: The Gathering is getting a live-action film treatment, and even Vampire: Survivors has both an animated series and a live-action movie in the works, despite developer Poncle admitting "the game has no plot."

But just because a deal is struck doesn't mean the film version is a guarantee. Donnie Yen tried to make a Sleeping Dogs movie for years before throwing in the towel, though now Simu Liu is shooting his shot. A Just Cause movie was announced in 2011, and only just recently got a new writer and director attached to it. Like Tom Hardy's Splinter Cell movie, also from 2011, sometimes these things simply don't happen.

Hopefully, both It Takes Two and Split Fiction won't share the same fate. "I think [Split Fiction] could become a really cool movie," Fares said, "if you write it the right way."

I was perhaps a bit uncharitable when the first Minecraft movie teaser dropped in 2024, and by "uncharitable" I mean that I may have sent off several emails to the Hague to complain about the commission of crimes against humanity. A bit extreme, perhaps, but I'm hardly the only one who was appalled by what they beheld: On YouTube, the teaser is currently rocking 737,000 likes, and 1.8 million dislikes. That's a yikes, as the kids most certainly no longer say.

No matter how plainly bad that teaser is (and look, I know it's for kids but it is bad and I will not be stepping down from this hill), the strength of the negativity caught one notable person off-guard: A Minecraft Movie star Jack Black.

"I mean, I was surprised, because I loved the trailer," Black told GamesRadar. "I was like, 'Oh, this is going to go over great. And, you know, there's always so many people that are sensitive to everything you put out there."

I'm not entirely clear what sort of sensitivity Black was referring to, unless he meant it like, this movie offends my sensibilities, which fits but isn't really the same thing. In any event, his confidence in the trailer, coupled with the wide, vocal public dislike, apparently left him badly shook: "I love the movie, but now I'm like, I don't know. Let's see what everyone else thinks, because I don't trust myself anymore."

To be fair to Black, it's possible that the reaction to the trailer (and more specifically his role in it) was amplified because it's his followup to Borderlands, the 2024 big screen catastrophe that earned him not just one but two Razzie Award nominations. (He didn't win either, by the way.)

He actually had one post-Borderlands film drop in 2024, Dear Santa, but it was direct-to-streaming so not really on the same scale. It also earned him another Razzie nom, so you can understand why some people might sort of reflexively recoil from more of this:

Black's mugging fizzog wasn't the only problem with the teaser, or even the problem at all necessarily. Director Jared Hess said in the same interview that "there was a lot of stuff in that teaser that was out of context." Subsequent trailers, which have looked somewhat less bad, did a better job of showcasing "the tone of what this movie is and really what the movie is all about."

"We always had confidence in the film that we were making, just because we, you know, we've been testing it, and just the reaction that we had from die-hard Minecraft fans was amazing," Hess said. "Now we're just at this amazing point where being able to share the film with everybody has just been incredible."

Despite the shaky start, and his shaken confidence, Black apparently believes the Minecraft movie is what humanity needs right now: "There’s so much violence and war and hatred," he said at the film's world premiere in London. "And that’s what I love about this movie—there’s a lot of love in it and there’s a lot of creativity."

A Minecraft Movie, as it's properly known, debuts in the US on April 4. Good or bad, we rather strongly suspect it will make a trillion dollars.