Does anyone really think that Warner Bros. is making this movie for a fringe audience?
Last week, Warner Bros. put out a teaser trailer of A Minecraft Movie, the studio's upcoming adaptation of Mojang and Microsoft's enormously popular video game. The trailer was met with some colorful reactions online, many of them not particularly happy nor optimistic about the film. When it comes to Minecraft, it makes sense that so many people would be up in arms over the movie, as it's the best-selling game ever made with 300 million units moved since its launch in 2011.
That's a heck of a lot of copies and probably even more fans, besides. Minecraft is a veritable cultural phenomenon, with the game, spin-offs, toys, cereal, clothes, and every other product under the sun that you can imagine. It's such an influential game that it's even used as an educational tool. Yet, despite such saturation and impact, there are some alleging that the poor reaction to the trailer isn't reflective of the quality of the footage shown off, but rather that anyone complaining is an old fogey who doesn't understand that A Minecraft Movie isn't made for them, it's made for... well, someone else.
Who is that someone else? Your guess is as good as mine. Children, I suppose? Children who don't have income and are dependent upon parents, many of whom at this point are people who have played or still are players of Minecraft, I might point out. Look, let's be frank: suggesting that the trailer fell flat because there's some mystical, special new audience that we're ignorant of is just nonsense. When you spend the sort of money that Warner Bros. is on A Minecraft Movie, which is estimated to be about $150 million, you want as many butts in seats as possible. Anyone who thinks that WB wants to cultivate a niche audience for $150 million is either disingenuous, ignorant, dumb, or some combination of all three.
No, A Minecraft Movie absolutely means to pull in as many viewers as possible. The problem is that the footage that was shown off, well, kind of sucks. It's about as simple as that. And saying something looks like it sucks doesn't mean you're out of touch, or hateful, or that you "don't get it." It means that the product, whatever it is, a show, a movie, a game, etc., is lacking. It's far past time to stop pretending that the audience is the problem. The real issue is activist journalists and dishonest shills. I can say that I wasn't thrilled with the trailer, but I'm happy to give the film a shot when it comes out next year.
Even if I'm "not" who the movie is being aimed at.
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