A Minecraft Movie Is Just What The 2025 Box Office Needed After A Slow Start To The Year

March 2025 is a month that the film industry is happy to put into the past. Between a lack of hyped features and the underperformance of Marc Webb’s Snow White, the box office numbers for the four week stretch could be described as dismal. The market has very much needed a blockbuster injection, and one arrived to kick off April in the form of Jared Hess’ A Minecraft Movie.

There has been hope for a while that the video game adaptation could inspire as much interest as similar titles – namely Jeff Fowler’s Sonic The Hedgehog trilogy, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Emma Tammi’s Five Nights at Freddy’s – and things have worked out as anticipated. Check out the full domestic top 10 in the chart below and join me after for analysis!

A Minecraft Movie Has 2025’s First Nine-Figure Domestic Debut

You know a feature has opened well when it nearly doubles the ticket sales of what was previously the highest grossing debut of the year, and that’s precisely what movie-goers got to witness over the last three days. In February, Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New World set the high water mark for 2025 when it made $88.8 million during its first Friday-to-Sunday playing on the big screen, and A Minecraft Movie just managed to bring in $157 million (per The Numbers).

It’s even more impressive when you rewind the clock back further than just the last four months. This is the sixth best opening weekend performance we’ve seen for a title if we go back to 2020 – and it’s sitting behind major titles including Jon Watts‘ Spider-Man: No Way Home ($260.1 million), Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine ($211.4 million), Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness ($187.4 million), Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever ($181.3 million) and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie ($162 million).

You’ll note that the titles I mentioned in the intro are not on that list, and that’s because A Minecraft Movie successfully outperformed all of the biggest recent video game adaptations in its first three days. When it first debuted almost exactly two years ago, The Super Mario Bros. Movie made $146.4 million. The 2025 blockbuster is outpacing it after its first three days, and it’s worth remembering that the Nintendo feature completed its big screen run making $574.9 million domestically and $1.4 billion worldwide. The industry on the whole would obviously love to see another hit of that size.

A Minecraft Movie has gotten what could be called a middling response from critics, but the film’s young target demographic meant that the release was always going to be critic-proof, and those heading to see it during opening weekend seem to be enjoying themselves – as indicated by the “B+” grade that was returned by CinemaScore surveys.

Whether or not A Minecraft Movie will be able to hang as one of the big video game adaptation blockbusters is something we won’t learn until seven days from now, however. As impressive as the opening weekend numbers were for The Super Mario Bros. Movie in 2023, what was far more important for the release’s success was the fact that it saw its ticket sales drop only 37 percent weekend-to-weekend. That’s a rare thing to see at this time of year – and I can’t say that I would actually be too surprised to see the new film with Jack Black and Jason Momoa pull it off. The market isn’t seeing the arrival of any new titles aiming to specifically steal its audience (more on that in a bit), so the only big question will be whether or not kids are already excited to see it again.

A Working Man Takes A Soft Fall Into Second Place In Its Second Weekend

With the arrival of A Minecraft Movie, there was always very little chance that David Ayer‘s A Working Man starring Jason Statham was going to be able to win the box office crown two weeks in a row. The real question was just about how much attention it would lose to the video game blockbuster. Now that the numbers are in, the answer is, “a decent amount.”

After dethroning Snow White last weekend by making $15.5 million in its first three days of release, the new action film added $7.3 million to its coffers since Friday, which calculates to a modest weekend-to-weekend drop of 53 percent. To date, the Jason Statham feature has made $27.8 million, and it seems to be following the trajectory of David Ayer’s The Beekeeper, albeit with slightly lower numbers (by its tenth day of release, the 2024 film sat at $31.3 million domestically).

Expanding the scope to the worldwide market, A Working Man – which was notably co-written by Sylvester Stallone – has made $44.4 million globally. Clearly it’s not a massive hit, but that is enough for it to rank in sixteenth place in the record books for the young year.

Looking ahead to next weekend there is every expectation that A Minecraft Movie will win its second box office crown, but the Top 10 will be populated with a bunch of new titles including James Hawes’ revenge thriller The Amateur starring Rami Malek; Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s intense and critically acclaimed war film Warfare, and Christopher Landon’s new horror feature Drop. Be sure to head back here to CinemaBlend next Sunday to see how they all perform in their opening weekend, and you can head over to our 2025 Movie Release Calendar to discover all of the big titles that are heading to theaters in the coming weeks and months.