Despite horrible reviews and criticism from fans of the titular game, A Minecraft Movie has become a massive success, and it owes all of it to the power of memes. In September 2024, the first trailer for A Minecraft Movie was released and was met with an enormous amount of hate, over one million dislikes on Youtube. As more details about the movie were shown to the public, people were still unhappy, so it’s strange to see how the film now has grossed over 300 million dollars at the box office on opening week.
This miraculous success is not due to the hidden quality of the film, as critics and audiences alike seem to agree that it isn’t quite a good film, the movie has seen a meteoric rise in popularity due to memes that began circulating on TikTok and the absolute chaos they’re causing in movie theatres around the world.
What is a “meme”?
By now, most people are familiar with what a “meme” is, however it may surprise a lot of them to find out the term was actually coined in 1976 by a British evolutionary biologist. We tend to associate memes with the digital era, referring to the most “ancient” memes as those popularised in the 2010s, nevertheless, the concept of a “meme” has been around for almost 50 years. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins defines a meme as a “unit of cultural information spread by imitation”; in other words, a meme is the cultural parallel to our biological genes: “they carry information, are replicated, and are transmitted from one person to another, and they have the ability to evolve, mutating at random and undergoing natural selection.”
Although this concept may have existed before, with the internet memes really took off. Internet memes began spreading like wildfire through email, websites and, especially social media. Because of the popularity of social media platforms, like Instagram and TikTok, memes have become a whole new form of communication, a way of connecting with people through a shared culture, they’ve also become very powerful in the world of marketing.
Trying to recreate Barbenheimer
In the year preceding the release of Barbie and Oppenheim, two highly anticipated films from acclaimed directors, users online pointed out how the two were being released on the same day and started talking about an hilarious double-feature opportunity: Barbenheimer.
The meme exploded and because of its popularity the two films were huge successes at the box office, eventually spawning an endless array of copy-cat marketing techniques. Studios tried to recreate the success of Barbenheimer with Paramount tweeting about the release of their Paw Patrol film on the same day as the Saw X.
Memes, much like genes, cannot be created out of convenience, they’re organic. However, what sets internet memes apart from the original meme concept Dawkins came up with, is the fact that memes don’t randomly evolve, their alteration is deliberate and comes from users.
The magic, and terror, of A Minecraft Movie memes
As previously mentioned, A Minecraft Movie is a massive success, and much of it is because of the memes, however such success has come with some controversy. The memes that have pushed A Minecraft Movie to the heights of Barbenheimer are not the same, people are going out to the theatre almost ironically. When clips of the film began circulating on TikTok, fans were quick to point out that the film seemed like a two hour montage of actor Jack Black naming things from the titular game. This became a joke amongst fans, who made TikTok videos and Tweeted about the “beauty” of witnessing a two-hour movie of Jack Black enthusiastically saying words from the game, such as: “flint and steel” or “chicken jockey”.
When the film finally released, on April 4th 2025, fans showed up in droves and the meme became reality as movie theatres erupted in thunderous applause and chaos each time Jack Black said one of the words from the internet meme. In the past week, things have gotten out of control with multiple people getting ejected and even the police being called on various occasions. Popcorn buckets are being thrown in the air and, on at least one occasion, a group of boys threw a whole bucket of water on some of the audience. Box office analysts are sunned at how many people this internet meme managed to bring to the cinema. Warner Bros. is already calling this a massive success, as the movie is projected to be the first this year to make one billion dollars. It is truly remarkable that an inside joke, born on TikTok and Twitter, can yield such financial power in the real world. It feels like every year or so a meme has this effect on the real world, and every year or so people remember how powerful these memes can be in our culture; but taking a step back and analysing whenever an event like this occurs is important, because if memes are the cultural parallel of genes it’s paramount we understand them fully in order to harness their power as best we can.
