Based on one of the world's best-selling video games, the film tells the story of four misfits pulled through a mysterious portal into the Overworld - the place where all players start in Minecraft. Despite underwhelming critics' reviews, the film, which boasts a star-studded cast including Jason Momoa, Jack Black and Jennifer Coolidge, exceeded expectations by making 300m ( 233m) globally at the box office on its opening weekend. In the film, Momoa's character Garrett Garrison has to battle a baby zombie riding a chicken on the way to finding the orb that can take him back to the real world. Hess and Black thought it would be funny if Black's character Steve announced everything that happens to him intensely, hence the "Chicken jockey!" meme taking off. "Jack says it with such passion," said Hess. "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.

If you're not familiar with Minecraft as a game then this film, notionally a big screen version of same, won't necessarily solve that. Minecraft, even more than most computer games, is what you make of it, an experience generated by the player. So in a way, the idea of making a film set in the Minecraft world is counterintuitive, because it can never replicate what is good about Minecraft, it can only tell you what is good about Minecraft. In addition to that, this comedy-fantasy takes aspects of the Minecraft world and uses them as building blocks in a rollicking adventure suitable for almost all ages, giving Jack Black and Jason Momoa carte blanche to wild out and be deeply silly. Your affection for and/or tolerance of this latter prospect will dictate to a large extent your enjoyment of this film.

Nothing makes you feel older than watching someone two generations younger than you play Minecraft – except, perhaps, watching someone two generations younger watching someone else play Minecraft on YouTube. Why are they always so over-excited?) This might all seem a bit 2011: gen A have generally moved on to watching YouTubers play Fortnite, Roblox and Elden Ring with their minds instead. But there are still millions of people, most of them kids, playing every month, and there's powerful nostalgia for this blocky virtual-Lego game among the gen Z young adults who grew up with it. A Minecraft movie was inevitable.

Jack Black is reportedly set to play Minecraft Steve. Deadline wrote on Tuesday that the School of Rock actor will play the game's blocky protagonist alongside Jason Momoa in the game's long-delayed film adaptation. The Minecraft adaptation has been in development since 2014. It's cycled through at least three previous directors (Shawn Levy, Rob McElhenney and Peter Sollett) and two missed release windows (2019 and 2022). Its current target date is April 4, 2025.

The title of "The Bad Batch," Ana Lily Amirpour's arid and feverish new movie, refers to the assorted undesirables who have been exiled by the U.S. government to a vast and barely habitable stretch of Texas wasteland. Under a merciless sun, a sullen new arrival named Arlen (the British actress Suki Waterhouse) is promptly captured by a gang of iron-pumping cannibals who tie her up, drug her and divest her of an arm and a leg. Arlen escapes, barely, and finds her way to a makeshift town of losers and drifters, noodle carts and shipping containers laughably known as Comfort. Ruled over by a self-styled messiah/drug dealer/harem-keeper known as the Dream (Keanu Reeves), Comfort is a slight improvement on Arlen's previous situation. But it's still no country for old men or young women -- or, for that matter, a little girl named Honey (Jayda Fink) and her bunny rabbit, both token symbols of innocence in this dust-choked dystopia.