It’s no secret that when the first Minecraft Movie trailer dropped last September, fans were a little worried about the film due to the uncanny valley-ness of the whole thing. However, despite the backlash that followed, star Jack Black and director Jared Hess have confessed that they never saw the negative reaction coming.
“I mean, I was surprised, because I loved the trailer. I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to go over great,'” said Black to GamesRadar+. “And, you know, there’s always so many people that are sensitive to everything you put out there.”
Black, who plays Steve, a player character taken from Mojang Studios’ sandbox game, added that the whole ordeal shook him, as he thought the trailer looked good. “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.”
After the teaser’s release, viewers had a lot of concerns over the clip, from the cast floating on a CGI background due to unfinished VFX editing, to the animals we know and love from the Minecraft game looking a little too fleshy – and don’t even mention that nightmarish sheep. However, Hess says that he thinks the negative reaction came from a lack of context and viewers perhaps not getting the tone of the movie, just as people didn’t ‘get’ his 2004 flick Napoleon Dynamite at first.
“I think everybody was concerned. But we also knew that there was a lot of stuff in that teaser that was out of context,” said the director. “There were so many details out of context, and we learned from it.” Hess adds that this spurred the team to release a whole stack of new trailers leading up to A Minecraft Movie’s April release to showcase “the tone of what this movie is and really what the movie is all about.”
However, Hess hasn’t let this “hiccup,” as he calls it, get him down. “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,” added Hess. “Now we’re just at this amazing point where being able to share the film with everybody has just been incredible.”
A Minecraft Movie follows four humans (Jason Momoa, Danielle Brooks, Sebastian Hansen, and Emma Myers) as they get sucked into a strange block filled universe and have to rely on a strange crafter named Steve in order to find their way home. The highly anticipated upcoming video game movie also stars Jennifer Coolidge.
A Minecraft Movie hits screens on April 4. For more, check out our list of the best video game movies, or keep up with upcoming movies heading your way.
