The Until Dawn film, on the other hand, is set to tell an original story set within the game’s universe. Director David F. Sandberg and his creative team seek to mimic the experience of playing a video game with its central device: each time the characters in the movie die they return to life, such as you would if you died in a game, only to find themselves within a new horror genre. Sure, it’s Groundhog Day with a meta bent, and wildly different from its source material—but isn’t such outside-the-box thinking attractive, especially in a genre that has historically consisted of cynical cash grabs and uninspired B-movies? (The YouTube comments raging against how unrecognizable this version of Until Dawn is would suggest not.)
The sequels on the docket are more straightforward. 2021’s Mortal Kombat, the second screen adaptation of the gory arcade beat-‘em-up that has been deleting thumbprints since 1992, was a gnarly hoot driven by reverence for its source material; we can probably expect the same from its successor. Emma Tammi’s Five Nights at Freddy’s, starring Josh Hutcherson as a pizzeria security guard hunted down at night by its creaking animatronic mascots, was a rote dud—but kids love the games and its sequel will surely make a bazillion dollars.
Without any doubt the biggest drop will be the aforementioned Minecraft film, in which Jack Black plays the series’ blocky mascot Steve, a master-miner who finds himself marooned in Minecraft’s cubic world. You can’t see the film adaptation of the world’s biggest video game flopping at the box office, but will it be more diamond than coal?
At this stage, it’s tough to call: on the one hand, based on the trailer, the film seems self-aware enough not to take itself too seriously, which strikes one as the right tone for a game that is basically about making things and little else. At the same time, it’d be a real feat for a movie based on a plotless game to sustain itself over an hour and a half, in which case it would feel as redundant as the worst video game movies of the genre’s Noughties nadir. But if it’s as clever and inventive as much of its young player base, A Minecraft Movie could mark a new evolution for video game cinema—and finally put the genre’s shoddy reputation to the pickaxe.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
