Minecraft Movie trailer explores the origins of Steve

The first teaser for A Minecraft Movie released in September to some decidedly mixed reactions, particularly concerning the CGI and character design and especially Jason Momoa's hair. And yes, there were many ridiculous memes. We were inclined to give it a chance based on the casting of Momoa and Jack Black. Now the full trailer has dropped, and honestly, odd design choices aside—and they are indeed odd—it looks like a perfectly acceptable fun family film and not much more, albeit very light on actual plot.

As previously reported, once the film went into development, Jared Hess (who worked with star Jack Black on Nacho Libre) ended up directing. The COVID pandemic and 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike delayed things further, but filming finally wrapped earlier this year in Auckland, New Zealand—just in time for a spring 2025 theatrical release. Per the official premise:

Welcome to the world of Minecraft, where creativity doesn’t just help you craft, it’s essential to one’s survival! Four misfits—Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen), Natalie (Emma Myers) and Dawn (Danielle Brooks)—find themselves struggling with ordinary problems when they are suddenly pulled through a mysterious portal into the Overworld: a bizarre, cubic wonderland that thrives on imagination. To get back home, they’ll have to master this world (and protect it from evil things like Piglins and Zombies, too) while embarking on a magical quest with an unexpected, expert crafter, Steve (Jack Black). Together, their adventure will challenge all five to be bold and to reconnect with the qualities that make each of them uniquely creative… the very skills they need to thrive back in the real world.

Game players will recognize Steve as one of the default characters in Minecraft. The teaser was set to The Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" and showed our misfits encountering a fantastical Tolkien-esque landscape—only with a lot more cube-like shapes, like a pink sheep with a cubed head.

The new trailer opens with a voiceover from Black's Steve, giving us a bit of his origin story. "As a child, I yearned for the mines," he says. "But something always got in the way." Maybe child labor laws? Nope, just a grouchy old man telling Steve to get out of there. Steve did not give up on the call of mines, and when he grew up, he started digging. And digging. Eventually, he dug himself a portal to a wonderland "where anything you can imagine is possible—as long as what you imagine can be built out of blocks."

The merry band of misfits joins Steve in the quest to stop dark forces from destroying that wonderland by "creating something amazing." The trailer doesn't get more specific than that, but audiences are probably more interested in the many Easter eggs and gags than a coherent plot. Props for Garrett's humorous teleportation experiment with the Ender pearl and the nighttime attack by Block Zombies.

A Minecraft Movie hits international theaters April 2, 2025, and North American theaters on April 4, 2025.