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You were right: Minecraft the Game changed because of the reaction to Minecraft the Movie

Word is still out on if Jack Black's song for Steve's Lava Chicken will ever be part of a future update to Minecraft, but it wouldn't surprise us

It is a wild time to be a veteran Minecraft player. This year's A Minecraft movie shattered box office expectations and became one of the rowdiest, most financially successful events to hit theaters thus far in 2025. And if you've been playing the game for a while, you may have started to wonder if your experience was changing after the film's success. Well, you would be correct.

At 2025's SXSW London, Minecraft's associate brand director Harry Elonen led a TED Talk-esque presentation called Entertain or Die: How Minecraft is Becoming a Modern Media Mogul. Fortunately for fans interested in the behind-the-scenes of the franchise's corporate success, Variety was there to report on what was said.

"We updated the base game inspired by the movie," Elonen proudly told the assembled crowd. "There’s things from the movie that we planted into the game experience."

For Elonen & Co, this inclusion of movie references into the Minecraft gamer's experience is part of a transmedia approach to making fans of the franchise happy. However, Elonen explains, this wasn't always the plan.

"When we launched the [advertising] campaign," says the Minecraft Exec "We didn’t see it as a campaign that had a beginning and an end. We thought about it being like a redstone circuit that fired up all channels immediately."

(In case you don't know, the redstone is a conductive material within the game that transfer energy. Makes more sense once you know that, right?)

But whatever the original plan for turning Minecraft into an entertainment powerhouse was, the one in the works now has been substantially sped up by the film's incredible success.

"We used to update once a year," Elonen tells the crowd. "Now we’re doing it four times a year." 

And with confirmation that A Minecraft Movie sequel is already in the earliest stages of development, those updates may become even more frequent. They're gonna need a lot more redtsones, is all we're saying.

A Minecraft Movie will stream on Max June 20.


You don't need to beat the game to prepare for the next one—here are all the major new and upcoming games coming our way.

 

Grant DeArmitt

Grant DeArmitt: Grant DeArmitt (he/him) likes horror, comics, and the unholy union of the two. As Popverse's Staff Writer, he criss-crosses the pop culture landscape bringing you the news and opinions about the big things (and the next big things). In the past, and despite their better judgment, he has written for Nightmare on Film Street and Newsarama. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner, Kingsley, and corgi, Legs.

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