Looks like NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM director Shawn Levy's attachment to the development of a MINECRAFT movie at Warner Bros is already over. The filmmaker has left the burgeoning project after just having his name attached within the last month. MINECRAFT, if you have zero interest in video games, is a best-selling independent sandbox game that is essentially a digital version of LEGOs. Players build worlds and encounter zombie like creatures in a world of their own creation. With THE LEGO MOVIE already spawning planned sequels and spin-offs, Warner Bros turned to the other popular block-based game to see if it could become a viable property.
So, what happened? According to an interview with The Wall Street Journal, it came down to creative differences.
What happened simply is, Warners asked me to develop kind of how might this ever be a story for a movie, because it’s not a narrative game. We came up with an approach that felt good to us and I discussed it with Mojang, the game makers who make Minecraft, and they were like, that doesn’t sound like what we want if we’re gonna see a movie get made. We don’t know what we want, but that doesn’t feel right. And I said okay, well that feels like — that’s a movie I can envision.
I thought it could have been a lot of fun and fulfilled a lot of the qualities people love about the game,â€Ã‚ he said. “But you know what it’s not my game, they know what they’re doing. And the truth is there is a long history of trying to make great movies out of games, and they’re rarely done well. I think Mojang is still figuring out what they want. We gave it a shot and it wasn’t the right fit, and so these things happen.
From the sounds of it, Levy and his screenwriters had an idea but it just didn't work for the game studio. Nintendo and Microsoft have been similarly finicky when it comes to films based off of their game properties since so many adaptations in the past have been awful. MINECRAFT is open enough that there is the potential for a movie to be made someday, but keep in mind that it took decades before Chris Miller and Phil Lord came along and found the perfect balance to make THE LEGO MOVIE work.
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