It isn’t as bad as it sounds, but Mojang (the studio behind Minecraft) are the reason why the director for the upcoming film adaptation has walked away.
Shawn Levy, the director of the Night At The Museum movies, was scheduled to be the director of the Minecraft movie. Recently he walked away from the project, and just recently he told The Wall Street Journal why that happened.
It turns out that it was a combination of WB and Mojang putting a lot on his plate, and not exactly know what they expect from that.
“[Warner Bros.] asked me to develop how might this ever be a story for a movie, because it’s a non-narrative game,” Levy told the Journal, “We came up with an approach that felt good to us, and I discussed it with Mojang … and they were like, ‘That doesn’t sound like what we want … If we’re going to see a movie get made, we don’t know what we want but that doesn’t feel right.'”
So it seems he was put in a position similar to The Lego Movie and both sides were somewhat expecting a similar creative idea to come about. What he came up with is unclear, but I see this as good news. At least WB didn’t greenlight the first thing that came to mind, and at least Mojang got a say in the film. Remember comic book movies before the companies themselves got involved? Yeah, wasn’t worth remembering right? So having video game studios involved seems like a good idea.
Overall a Minecraft movie should spend a ton of time leading up to development because that is where it will be it’s test. The Lego Movie could have been terrible, but it wasn’t thanks to creative ideas.