WEEKLY RECAP #72: "A Minecraft Movie" Trailer, "Nightbitch" Trailer & MORE!

9/1/24 -- 9/7/24

Miner Emergency

The only trailers that truly generate heated widespread debate more than teasers for comic book movies are those for live-action adaptations of beloved games — and the “debate” in question is usually a fiery vortex of hatred and disgust spewing from the mouths of casual gamers horrified to see the most iconic characters of their childhood turned into repugnant CGI abominations. We’ve seen it many times before, and it appears that time itself is a flat circle in which nothing ever changes and the same plagues revisit us with new disguises. That’s right, everyone: the trailer for A Minecraft Movie — not The Minecraft Movie, A Minecraft Movie —debuted this week, and it is not very good. “Wait, what,” you ask — “the Minecraft movie trailer was bad?!?! Who could have foreseen this?” I know, it’s crazy that we fall hook-line-and-sinker for the same inflated expectations every single time one of these video game movies get announced, à la Charlie Brown with Lucy’s really fucking mean football trick. And I’ll be honest and vulnerable for a moment here, folks — for once, my sarcastic ridiculing also applies to myself, since I did indeed portray some optimism when covering the announcement of A Minecraft Movie’s promising cast & crew in Weekly Recap #39 seven months ago. Acclaimed set designers and charismatic supporting cast be damned — the stench of corporate cringe has permeated even the most airtight crevices in this project’s hull.

Where to begin with this trailer? The unconvincing green screens enhanced by the terrible lighting? The fuck-ass costumes they gave the human cast for some unknown reason? The choice to have live-action humans in a Minecraft game at all? The bizarre choice to not only do the tired “epic rendition of a classic song” trailer cliche but to go with — of all songs — “Magical Mystery Tour” by The Beatles? (I’m sure the dopamine-poisoned TikTok-brained zoomers who this movie is targeting will love that one!) The absolutely baffling design of the Minecraft world that seems to have only half-committed to the block design? (All the living creatures are shaped like cubes, but not so sharply that they straight-up resemble pixels, and so they’re kind of rounded on the edges like plushies, trapped in a fucked-up Cronenbergian halfway-state between organic and digital cubic material.) Jack Black doing his Jack Black schtick that was already not that funny in The Super Mario Bros. Movie (despite how many adult children attempted to convince us that his annoying “Peaches” song unironically deserved an Oscar) and now comes off like a cameo in a YouTube Rewind sketch? The cancer-inducing end stinger joke with an appallingly designed llama that is so unfunny on paper alone that its inclusion feels like a mistake left in from a first draft?

I could keep going on and on, but you get the picture — at a measly one minute and nineteen seconds, the trailer for A Minecraft Movie has garnered Sonic trailer levels of hatred with more dislikes than likes on YouTube. Sure, nothing pleases the gamers, but if this trailer is representative of the final product, Warner Bros. definitely could’ve done better… and I’m sorry, but the fact that this movie is a full decade too late doesn’t help their case at all. And unlike Sonic, I don’t think they can attempt a last-minute character design change that “fixes” the main issue with the movie in people’s eyes — the ire this time seems to come from the entire vibe and aesthetic of the movie. Sure, video game movies have been garnering more success in recent years, but the trailers for The Super Mario Bros. Movie had generally decent reception, and this movie is so far achieving the exact opposite. I doubt it’ll bomb, but it certainly isn’t going to be a sweeping box office success on the same level. At this point, Warner Bros. just needs to focus on damage control and hope that the name brand alone draws in enough stupid children to break even. Sure, it’s a cynical strategy, but when your art fails, cynicism is always a pretty reliable Plan B!

Do My Claws, Cut My Fur, I’m a Brand New Bitch

Remember when Amy Adams was in good movies? Her career certainly had a promising start, and by the 2010s, Ms. Adams was turning in incredible performances in movies like The Master, Her, Nocturnal Animals and Arrival. However, an unfortunate fact about the entertainment industry is that the best performances don’t always get the most recognition. In fact, sometimes they get little to none! And ever since Amy Adams didn’t win awards for any of these noteworthy achievements in acting, things haven’t been the same. For a woman that clearly has an immense level of talent and should be booked and busy, she hasn’t been starring in as many projects as you’d think, and the ones she has chosen range from underwhelming to downright stinky. From Justice League to Hillbilly Elegy to The Woman in the Window to Dear Evan Hansen, the peak-to-shit ratio in her filmography has been getting dangerously smaller, and the more that it happens, the weirder it gets.

Case in point: the newly-released trailer for Nightbitch — hell of a title — which is an upcoming movie based on a satirical novel by Rachel Yoder, about a mother exasperated by her domestic suburban routine who begins to believe she is literally turning into a dog. And yes, if you couldn’t tell by the fucking epic image I included above this section, Amy Adams plays the titular Bitch. I knew about her attachment to this project and what the premise was for quite a while, and with a story and subtext that seems equal parts prescient and ridiculous, I was very curious to see what the tone of the movie would be like. The trailer has now given me an answer, and that answer is: a whimsical, quirky studio comedy? Everything from the music choice to the borderline slapstick of Amy Adams — an Academy Award-nominated actress — doing canine antics seem to imply a fun, wacky romp about a lady who just wants to be herself, and… I dunno, the whole thing is just odd.

Look, I’m all for weird-ass non-franchise movies that try something new, but given that people who’ve actually read the book are saying the original story leans more into a darkly comedic psychological drama, was this fallen comedy tone really the right choice? Maybe I’m being too judgmental, but c’mon man — it just makes me really sad to see Amy Adams barking at people on all fours and running around with a group of neighborhood dogs! She should have a fucking Oscar by now, and she’s trapped in this weird B-project purgatory! FREE MY GIRL! Someone tell her to fire her agent and get her tapped to a Yorgos Lanthimos project right now! Amy, pick up the phone! There are twelve hot single auteur directors open for collaboration in your area right now!

Summertime Stat-List (Cedric Gervais Remix)

This hot-ass weather might not be finished making us sweaty and riddled with mosquito-borne diseases, but the literal summer months are over, and so concludes an interesting 3-4 months at the 2024 box office. This past summer movie season was certainly off to a turbulent start, with a number of expected hits like The Fall Guy and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga not making nearly as much as expected… but if there’s one thing you need to remember about the film industry, it’s that nothing ever stays the same for more than a few minutes. By mid-summer, a few major tentpoles had helped pit up some slack, and by the end of August, practically every major studio had at least one movie that overperformed expectations, whether it be Twisters for Universal, A Quiet Place: Day One for Paramount or It Ends With Us for Sony. Disney in particular is having a complete opposite to their flop era last year, with Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine making an obscene amount of money that calls to mind their glory days in the late 2010s. (Great news for Marvel fans, terrible news for me.) In total, “domestic revenue for the 2024 summer box office hit an estimated $3.67 billion, down 10.3 percent over 2023, according to final numbers issued Tuesday by Comscore” (THR). Not bad, considering how difficult it would’ve been to replicate the steroids that Barbenheimer pumped into the box office last summer. Sure, we still have a long way to go before we return to pre-COVID levels of box office enthusiasm, but with so many blockbusters that proved more profitable than expected this summer, there’s never been more signs that it’s possible.