"A Minecraft Movie," the big-screen adaptation of the popular video game "Minecraft," has been packing theaters with rowdy kids and teens since its release this month, spurring a social media phenomenon and sparking concern for America's youth. Videos on social media show young theatergoers huge reactions to one key scene, where one of the film's stars, Jack Black, yells out the phrase "Chicken Jockey!" as a small, Frankenstein-looking creature lands on top of a chicken in a boxing ring to face off with co-star Jason Momoa. The scene has prompted excited fans to scream, shout, throw popcorn around, jump up out of their seats, and in one instance in Provo, Utah, toss a live chicken in the air during a screening, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. Springs Cinema & Taphouse in Sandy Springs, Georgia, told FOX 5 Atlanta that its staff has had to clean up popcorn, ICEEs, ketchup and shattered glass. The scene featuring the "Chicken Jockey" in "A Minecraft Movie" has spawned some chaotic movie theater behavior from young audiences. "The movie-going experience has changed a lot since I was younger," Josh Gunderson, director of marketing and events at Oviedo Mall in Florida, told FOX Business.

This week I took my son, Zac, to see the new Minecraft movie, which is hardly a remarkable statement in the highly video game-branded world of 21st-century cinema – except that what followed was not typical at all. As you may have seen from a number of bewildered news reports over the last few days, A Minecraft Movie has quickly engendered a community of, let's say, highly engaged and enthusiastic fans. Spurred on by TikTok meme posts, vast portions of the film's audience are now yelling out key lines of dialogue as they happen and singing along to the songs. In one key moment where a rare character from the game – the zombie chicken jockey – is introduced, they go absolutely crazy, throwing drinks and popcorn around, and in some US cinemas, getting escorted from the screening by police. The reaction was a little more muted in our tiny independent cinema in Frome, but still, there were rows of teenagers who had clearly seen all the TikTok posts telling them which lines to shout along to, and went to throw stuff, and they were extremely excited to be doing so, a few surreptitiously filming their mates' reactions so they could add to the social media carnage.

I've never played Minecraft in my life--but then I'm not a Christian, either, and have always delighted in the distinctly Mormon cinematic universe of Jared Hess, the director of "A Minecraft Movie." He's best known for "Napoleon Dynamite," from 2004, which evokes its spiritual milieu only implicitly, by the absence of secular pop culture and of teen-age ribaldry. He followed it with "Nacho Libre," starring Jack Black as a friar who enters the wrestling ring to save a convent, and, in 2009, with "Gentlemen Broncos," a celestial gross-out vision of an adolescent gospel. His satire "Don Verdean," from 2015, is explicitly set in church communities and involves relic smuggling in Israel; his 2016 comedy, "Masterminds," is a heist film that's centered on grace and holy innocence. With "A Minecraft Movie," I was impatient to see what Hess would do with another world of extreme fantasy, akin to that of "Gentlemen Broncos." The short answer is, too much and not nearly enough; the I.P. is the boss, the characters are its minions, and Hess--constrained both by a script that he didn't write and by the demands of complex C.G.I.--struggles to live up to his own œuvre, which is among the most substantially loopy (or loopily substantial) in modern cinema.

It was natural that the recent boom in video game adaptations would yield a new film based on the best-known virtual universe of the modern era. Minecraft, the Microsoft-owned digital sandbox that holds the record as the bestselling video game of all time, is finally taking its place in the annals of beloved gaming franchises--like Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog--that have earned the Hollywood studio treatment, celebrity stars and special effects and all. Helmed by Napoleon Dynamite director and friend of Slate Jared Hess, A Minecraft Movie throws Jack Black, Jason Momoa, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers, and Jennifer Coolidge into the titular game's pixelated universe, subjecting their real-life bodies to the simplistic physics, creative engineering, and bizarre supernatural life forms that make up the expansive worlds of Minecraft. It took about a decade to get this flick off the ground, so the anticipation is high--especially among younger gamers addicted to the online playgrounds that gained such traction during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Already, the film is breaking box-office records held by previous game adaptations, and if you have a child who spends a lot of time playing on the computer, chances are they're definitely ready and excited to catch A Minecraft Movie--even if you barely know what Minecraft is.

By any estimation, Minecraft is impossibly successful. The bestselling video game ever, as of last December it had 204 million monthly active players. Since it was first released in 2011, it has generated over 3bn ( 2.3bn) in revenue. What's more, its players have always been eager to demonstrate their fandom outside the boundaries of the game itself. In 2021, YouTube calculated that videos related to the game – tutorials, walk-throughs, homages, parodies – had collectively been viewed 1tn times. In short, it is a phenomenon.

I too rolled my eyes when A Minecraft Movie was announced. We're all tired of seeing Jack Black in video game movies -- he was fine in Super Mario Bros., but good god Borderlands was a disaster. And the Minecraft film's trailers did it no favors, another soulless movie produced on a virtual set about a game that's completely open-ended and plotless. But it turns out A Minecraft Movie is actually good. Honestly, I'm as surprised as you are.

The attention put a rocket under his music career. While his first two albums were DIY affairs, recorded in a couple of days and self-released, his latest, The Crux, was created in New York's fabled Electric Lady studios. Released on Friday, it's packed full of off-kilter lyrics and squiggly synth lines that burrow into your brain. The first two singles, Delete Ya and Basic Being Basic have already been radio hits, and the rest of the album pulls on influences as diverse as Electric Light Orchestra, New Order, Cake, Hall & Oates and Bruce Springsteen (coincidentally, all bands that would work perfectly on the Stranger Things soundtrack). There are a couple of knockouts – including the crunchy garage rock of Gap Toothed Smile, and the choppy New Wave anthem Link – but the point of the album is its diversity.

Dust off your pickaxe because Mojang Studios and Merlin Entertainments are building a new series of theme park style attractions called "Adventures Made Real" that will bring the world of Minecraft to life. Merlin Entertainments will create two permanent Minecraft theme park locations including one in the US and another in the UK with a plan to open them between 2026 and 20277. The new Minecraft parks will have interactive attractions from the top-selling video game, along with all the usual experiences like rides, gift shops and restaurants and plans to "expand these experiences to other destinations globally," according to Merlin's statement. Of course, the parks will also involve some level of digital perks. It's not clear what they'll involve specifically, but Merlin claims the parks will include "touchpoints that will allow guests to unlock exclusive in-game content to continue their gaming journey."

In early September, Warner Bros. released a teaser for A Minecraft Movie, the studio's new film based on Mojang's nearly 15-year-old sandbox game. Directed by Napoleon Dynamite helmer Jared Hess, it was, frankly, very goofy. Jack Black was Steve; Jason Momoa was sporting maybe the worst hairdo he's ever had. Everyone involved, even the animated creatures, seemed to think they were in a different movie. But that wasn't what the trolls latched onto.

The team behind the upcoming Minecraft movie shared a new clip during Minecraft Live that expands on the brief crafting moment we saw in the polarizing first teaser. The scene comes in the middle of a discussion between Mojang creative director Torfi Frans Olafsson and A Minecraft Movie director Jared Hess, at 4:51. The segment also gives us our first look at the movie's interpretation of a Minecraft bee, which I'm not quite sure how to feel about yet. That you can find toward the end of the video. A Minecraft Movie is slated for release in April 2025 and stars Jack Black as Steve, alongside Jason Momoa, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers and Sebastian Eugene Hansen.