Minecraft wasn’t always the enormous franchise that it has become. It has slowly been building in popularity since its creator, Markus Persson, released the game in 2009. So, what is it about this independently created game that made it endure over time?
Microsoft’s ownership of “Minecraft” has made for some decidedly strange situations.
There was none more bizarre than this week, when company executive Phil Spencer celebrated the launch of “Minecraft” for Nintendo’s hot new game console, the Switch. As of May 11, you can buy and play “Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition,” a fact Spencer touted on Twitter:
What makes this so weird is Spencer is the guy in charge of Microsoft’s gaming division. That makes him responsible for sales of Microsoft’s Xbox One game console. And the Switch is Nintendo’s latest rival to the Xbox One.
In the game business, great games drive hardware sales. Consumers often buy particular consoles because they want to play a hit new game.
With that in mind, console makers have tried to develop blockbuster games that they have exclusive rights too. And they typically reserve those games for their own platforms. For example, “Halo,” “Forza Motorsport,” “Gears of War” and other game franchises that Microsoft owns are only available for its Xbox consoles or PCs running its Windows operating system.
The idea is that those franchises will drive people to buy Microsoft hardware (in the case of the Xbox One) or software (in the case of Windows 10).
Spencer is in charge of overseeing Microsoft’s games in addition to its consoles. So you might think he’d want to use “Minecraft” to help boost the Xbox One, not one of its chief rivals. After all, “Minecraft” is one of the most popular games in the world. Instead, here he was not only green lighting a game that could boost the Switch, he was celebrating its launch!
But such weird situations are nothing new. Microsoft has been placed in them repeatedly ever since it purchased “Minecraft” back in 2014. That’s because Microsoft has continued to support the game on a whole slew of platforms it doesn’t control. You can play it on your phone (iPhone and Android), on your tablet, on your computer (PC or Mac), and even on Sony’s PlayStation 4.
Heck, the Switch isn’t even the first Nintendo console for “Minecraft” to appear on. Microsoft previously released a version of the game for the Wii U, Nintendo’s last home console.
Which isn’t to say there’s something wrong with Microsoft preserving the legacy of “Minecraft” as a game you can play on pretty much anything.It might be a smart business move! And from a consumer’s perspective, it’s mighty nice to be able to play the game on any platform you want. But that situation is a tremendous outlier in terms of typical game industry strategy, and it sticks out as a result.
It’s outright fantastic that “Minecraft” just launched on the Nintendo Switch, a platform that makes perfect sense for it. It’s also outright bizarre that Microsoft is responsible for making that happen.
One tweet perfectly highlights the bizarre position Microsoft is in with ‘Minecraft’
This week’s Ketchup brings you another ten headlines from the world of film development news (those stories about what movies Hollywood is working on for you next). Included in the mix this time around are stories about such titles as Captain Marvel, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and a new Fast and the Furious spinoff franchise.
In previous updates about Disney’s live-action remake of their 1992 animated hit Aladdin, surprisingly little was revealed about the movie’s most popular character, the Genie, originally voiced by the late Robin Williams. Yes, there were stories a few years ago about a possible movie called Genies, all about them, but since this live-action version started taking off, the focus has been on the two leads. And that’s the thing; the lead characters of Aladdin are actually Aladdin and Jasmine (for whom an international casting call was recently held). Well, this week, we learned that Disney is in talks with a very big star to take over the mile-a-minute, stream-of-consciousness that Robin Williams started, and it’s Will Smith. The Men in Black and Suicide Squad star had recently been talking to Disney about playing the villain in their new Dumbo, but this is arguably (or even, obviously) a much bigger deal. Aladdin is going to be directed by Guy Ritchie (Sherlock Holmes), and filming is scheduled to start in the U.K. in July. There’s no release date yet, but the timing suggests that it will probably be sometime in 2019. Will Smith is also the first actor mentioned for any Aladdin role.
Marvel has established a pretty good track record hiring lesser known directors for their films. Examples include Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi (What We Do in the Shadows), Ant-Man director Peyton Reed (Bring It On, The Break-Up), and, to a lesser degree, Black Panther director Ryan Coogler (Creed). Along the same lines, some of the directors that Marvel was previously considering for 2019’s Captain Marvel previously worked on projects like Whale Rider, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, and Showtime’s Homeland. The co-directors who actually landed the job this week have similar indie credits: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck three features together so far include Sugar, It’s Kind of a Funny Story, and 2015’s Mississippi Grind. Brie Larson similarly rose up from similar independent projects like 2013’s Short Term 12 and 2015’s Room, which earned her a Best Actress Oscar. Captain Marvel will start filming in February, 2018, and will be released on March 8, 2019.
Five of Clint Eastwood’s last six films as director have all been based on true stories: Invictus, J. Edgar, Jersey Boys, American Sniper, and last year’s Sully. This week, he added yet another one, and like American Sniper and Sully, it’s based on events from the recent past. Rather, the very recent past, because The 15:17 to Paris will depict the August, 2015 thwarting of an attempt by an ISIS terrorist to kill hundreds of people aboard a train from Brussels to Paris. You can read the details of the event here, but the gist is that three young Americans (two of them off-duty soldiers) subdued the terrorist before he was able to kill anyone. Eastwood’s film will be adapted from the book The 15:17 To Paris: The True Story Of A Terrorist, A Train, And Three American Heroes, co-written by the three friends, Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, and Spencer Stone.
As of last night, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is still two weeks away from release, but this week, director/writer James Gunn confirmed he’ll be back for a third outing (which we’re guessing will be subtitled Vol. 3). Soon after, Gunn also confirmed that it will be the “final in this iteration.” (In the comics, as with many superhero teams, there have been a few different versions of Guardians of the Galaxy — the movie version didn’t premiere until 2008.) As for what that third movie might include, one writer speculates that Adam Warlock, who was teased in the first movie and reportedly almost included in the second, could make his official debut. Another character we learned was cut from Vol. 2 was someone who previously would have been a “spoiler” (except now he’s not in the movie), and that’s longtime Avengers member Wonder Man, AKA Simon Williams (you can see images from the “Simon Williams Film Festival” here).
There have been rumors lately that some of the stars of the Fast and the Furious franchise might be leaving after the 10th movie (this year’s movie was #8) in the franchise. This week’s news lends some credence to that theory, as Universal Pictures is reportedly now developing a spinoff franchise that would focus on some of the characters who joined the Fast & Furious franchise in relatively recent films. Specifically, the spinoffs would focus on the characters Luke Hobbs (played by Dwayne Johnson), Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), and “Cipher” (Charlize Theron). The first screenplay is being written by screenwriter Chris Morgan, who has worked on the franchise ever since the first movie in 2001. No deals are in place for those three stars yet, and presumably it wouldn’t happen until after the 10th Fast and the Furious film (which itself is not confirmed to be the last Fast and Furious movie yet, either).
Although there are certainly biopics made while their subjects are still alive (Stephen Hawking, for example), they’re far more commonly made posthumously, for obvious reasons. One that’s been in development over the last few years is a film based on the life of famed war journalist Marie Colvin. The circumstances of Colvin’s death also make her story timely and of interest to filmgoers, as she died in 2012 while covering the early months of the Syrian Civil War. We can now report that Marie Colvin will be portrayed in the as-yet-untitled film about her life by Rosamund Pike, who is probably still best known for starring in Gone Girl. Colvin’s career as a war reporter included coverage of conflicts in Chechnya, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, and Sri Lanka (where a blast from a RPG in 2001 caused the loss of Colvin’s left eye and prompted her to don her signature black eye patch).
Last month, comedian Amy Schumer dropped out of Sony Pictures’ live action Barbie movie, and now, just a month later, she’s already got another new film that she might have ready for 2018. The new comedy is called I Feel Pretty, but besides that, there isn’t much else to say, because its premise is being kept “under wraps.” Schumer is expected to start filming I Feel Pretty on location on the East Coast this summer. Her next movie will be next month’s Snatched (with Goldie Hawn playing her mom during a vacation gone wrong). After that, Schumer will co-star in the drama Thank You For Your Service (about soldiers with PTSD). The indie movie that conflicted with filming Barbie and forced her to drop out is called She Came to Me, and her co-stars will include Steve Carell and Nicole Kidman.
This past “awards season,” 20th Century Fox had great success with Hidden Figures, which depicted an unsung tale of relatively recent female history (i.e. the role of African American mathematicians during the “space race”). It now sounds like Fox 2000 might have found another similar project called Silver Wings, which will be adapted from an upcoming nonfiction book called The Women with Silver Wings. The book by Katherine Sharp Landdeck tells the true stories of some of the female pilots in W.A.S.P. (Women Airforce Service Pilots), the first women to fly for the U.S. military, as part of World War II. Silver Wings will also mark the feature film debut of director Thomas Kail, who is best known for directing the hit broadway musical Hamilton. The federal government did not recognize the W.A.S.P. pilots as official veterans for decades until a 2009 ceremony that overturned that policy and rewarded them with the Congressional Gold Medal (and V.A. benefits).
In the months leading up to the filming of this December’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi (AKA Episode VIII), a good amount of press was devoted to the casting of both Benicio Del Toro and Laura Dern, who were cast as characters new to the Star Wars franchise. This past weekend at the annual Star Wars Celebration event in Orlando, however, fans were surprised to discover that the new character described as having the largest role is played by neither Del Toro nor Dern, but a young actress named Kelly Marie Tran. Tran will play Rose, a Resistance maintenance worker who’s “not looking to be a hero, and she gets pulled a very big way into an adventure in this movie with Finn.” Star Wars: The Last Jedi is scheduled for release on December 15, 2017.
The expression says that “A picture is worth a thousand words”, but it’s less clear how many words a 70-second video is worth. That, however, is exactly what Fox Animation is now working on, as the studio is now developing the animated short film A Tale of Momentum & Inertia into a feature film. To that end, Fox Animation has secured the screenwriting talents of writers Eyal Podell and Jonathon E. Stewart, who worked on this summer’s Cars 3. The short film depicts “a rock giant who accidentally unleashes a massive boulder to roll thunderously down toward a seaside kingdom and his attempt to stop it,” but presumably, the movie will have a lot more to it. Maybe we’ll meet some of the people who are in danger of being squished?
Will Smith In Talks To Play Aladdin’s Genie, and More Movie News
This week’s biggest and most surprising news was sort of a confluence of two stories from earlier in the year. First, there was the Twitter announcement from director Guillermo Del Toro in February that, “Hellboy 3 Sorry to report: Spoke w all parties. Must report that 100% the sequel will not happen. And that is to be the final thing about it.” Note that Del Toro was speaking specifically about a sequel to the two Hellboy movies that he directed, starring Ron Perlman. Also, earlier this year, David Harbour (Stranger Things) was in contention for the role of Cable in Deadpool 2, suggesting he was interested in starring in a comic book movie — that role eventually went to Josh Brolin instead. Put all of that together, and it leads to this week’s news of a Hellboy reboot starring David Harbour and directed by Neil Marshall (The Descent, the Blackwater and Watchers on the Wall episodes of Game of Thrones.) The new movie, possibly titled Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen, will be from Millennium Films, the company best known for mid-level budget action movies like The Expendables and Olympus Has Fallen. The Hellboy reboot was described by its new screenwriter as, “a darker, more gruesome version of Hellboy… walk[ing] a razor’s edge between horror and comic book movie.”
Even those who never saw James Cameron’s 2009 hit Avatar are likely to know it involved blue aliens that looked like a cross between deer and elves (i.e. the Na’vi). Cameron has been talking about his sequels for years and years now, including the detail that the story would be moving to Pandora’s oceans. This week, Fox and Cameron revealed their first new cast member, confirming the new setting. Prolific character actor Cliff Curtis, currently starring on AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead, has signed on to play “Tonowari, the leader of the Metkayina reef people clan.” What we don’t know from that description is whether the “reef people” are also Na’vi, another Pandoran race, or a little bit of both. 20th Century Fox has scheduled the four Avatar sequels for December dates in 2020, 2021, 2024, and 2025, starting with Avatar 2 on December 18, 2020.
The works of British children’s authors have inspired a number of big screen adaptations, but their lives themselves have also provided some rich material. Some notable examples include Finding Neverland (Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie), Shadowlands (Narnia creator C.S. Lewis), Saving Mr. Banks (Mary Poppins creator P.L. Travers), and Miss Potter (Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter). Another prolific British author was Roald Dahl, whom we can thank for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Witches, Matilda, and last year’s The BFG. Well, it’s finally Dahl’s turn to receive a (shared) biopic, and the actor who has landed the role is Hugh Bonneville. Downton Abbey fans will know Bonneville for portraying Lord Robert Crawley, the 7th Earl of Grantham. The currently untitled biopic will tell “a bittersweet, comedic story focusing on Dahl’s marriage to actress Patricia Neal, [as] the story moves between New York, England and Los Angeles in the early 1960s, a time when Dahl struggled to write some of his most famous works and Neal returned to acting with Hud.”
Italian director Luca Guadagnino has yet to have a hit in the USA, but after his debut in 2010 (I Am Love), he has continued to attract actors that suggest it might just happen for him soon. For example, Guadagnino’s 2016 film, A Bigger Splash, featured the talents of Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson, and Ralph Fiennes. If negotiations work out for his fourth film, titled Rio (not to be confused with the 2011 animated hit of the same name), Guardagnino will be assisted by Benedict Cumberbatch and Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal will play a financial reporter who travels to Rio de Janeiro to visit a wealthy friend (Benedict Cumberbath), only to find himself sucked into a plot to fake his friend’s death. Like many of the films covered in this week’s Ketchup, Rio is making the news now in advance of being sold to various international markets at next week’s Cannes Film Festival.
Blogs, websites, and columns about film development (like this one) sometimes cover news years ahead of time, but we can’t necessarily presume everyone will remember every detail. Consider, for example, the news from March of last year about the rumored casting of two of the leads in next year’s X-Men spinoff, The New Mutants (4/13/18), to be directed by Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars). As it turns out, that story was on the money, but the official announcement didn’t happen until this week. Maisie Williams, best known as Arya Stark from Game of Thrones, has been cast as Rahne Sinclair, AKA Wolfsbane, a Scottish teenager with the ability to turn into a wolf (and a halfway werewolf form too). Anya Taylor-Joy, the star of last year’s The Witch (and this year’s Split) has been cast as Illyana Rasputin, AKA Magik, the little sister of Colossus, who can teleport, use magic, and also has a really big sword. As The Hollywood Reporter reports, “Fox is making serious efforts to find ethnically appropriate actors, conducting wide searches for a Native American to play Moonstar and a South American for Sunspot.” The other New Mutants will be Cannonball and Warlock, but apparently, not founding member (in the comics), Karma.
If you’ve been following film development news long enough, you may be familiar with a biopic called My Dinner with Herve, which refers to 1970s actor Herve Villechaize. Villechaize (who was also a dwarf) was basically known for two roles: the villain Nick Nack in the James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun and (more famously) Tattoo on the ABC TV show Fantasy Island. Villechaize also struggled with personal demons, ending his own life in 1993. It’s not yet known how much My Dinner with Herve will explore the latter, but we now know that Villechaize will be portrayed by Peter Dinklage, AKA Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones. Jamie Dornan (Fifty Shades of Grey) will costar with Dinklage as a struggling journalist who finds himself spending a wild night with Villechaize, partying at locations all over Los Angeles. HBO Films is producing, but the company may also seek a theatrical release.
Australian actress Margot Robbie is probably best known for starring as Harley Quinn in last year’s Suicide Squad and Jane in The Legend of Tarzan, but in the near future, she’ll be starring in three biopics (I, Tonya; Goodbye Christopher Robin; and Mary Queen of Scots), and she also voiced a role in next year’s animated version of Peter Rabbit. On top of all that Robbie is also taking control of her own agency by becoming a producer, and the latest film project she’s producing for herself as a starring vehicle is called Dreamland. Set during the “Dust Bowl” devastation of Depression Era America, Dreamland is a bank robber thriller about “a 15-year-old boy on his quest to capture a fugitive bank robber (Robbie) and collect the bounty on her head, all with the goal of saving his family farm from foreclosure.” Director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte is reportedly, “hoping to bring a balance of nostalgic beauty and gritty realism to the proceedings as well as a balance between a sense of romanticism and a sense of violence.”
Another actor who continues to establish a new identity on the big screen is Daniel Radcliffe, the former Harry Potter child star. Last year saw the release of probably the craziest example of his efforts to branch out, in the form of Swiss Army Man, in which he played a corpse with amazing gastrointestinal “powers.” Radcliffe is now attached to star in an action comedy called Guns Akimbo, to be directed by New Zealand’s Jason Lei Howden, who made his debut with the heavy metal comedy Deathgasm. Radcliffe will play a man with a dead-end job who finds himself “enrolled on a dark net website that forces complete strangers to fight in a city-wide game of death so that their gladiatorial battles can be live-streamed worldwide to a fanatical audience.”
Tom Hanks has obviously starred in a wide variety of films during his lengthy career, but he has yet to appear in a Western. That’s about to change, as he is now attached to star in a film adaptation of the Paulette Jiles novel News of the World, written by Luke Davies (Lion) for Fox 2000. Hanks will star as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Texas cowboy in 1870 who “travels from town to town to read the news to locals who would otherwise not know what is going on in the world. While Kidd is sparked up by spreading the word of the passage of the 15th Amendment that gave voting rights to all men, he agrees to escort a 10-year-old white girl to her aunt and uncle in San Antonio after she was rescued from the Kiowa Indian tribe that kidnapped her and killed her family four years earlier. His traveling partner is an ornery youngster who didn’t want to be rescued and brought to her relatives.”
In RT’s latest 24 Frames gallery, you can browse through “24 Dicks We Love From Movies and TV” to mark the debut of Amazon’s I Love Dick. Well, Johnny Depp is now attached to star in a dramedy called Richard Says Goodbye, so we might have another to add to the list. This will be the second film from indie director Wayne Roberts, who made his debut last year with the similarly titled Katie Says Goodbye, starring Olivia Cooke, Mireille Enos, James Belushi, and Mary Steenburgen. Depp will star as “a world-weary college professor who is given a life-changing diagnosis and then decides to throw all pretense and conventions to the wind and live his life as boldly and freely as possible. With a biting sense of humor, a reckless streak and a touch of madness, he binges through every vice: smoking, drinking, sex, and hurling blunt insults at anyone who annoys him, giving him more pleasure than he’s had in years.” Johnny Depp previously starred in a similar film, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, based on the novel by Hunter S. Thompson.
Stranger Things Star David Harbour Will Star In A Hellboy Reboot, and More Movie News
This weekend two new major new releases disappointed while there were a couple of surprises near the bottom of the top 10.
The rag-tag team of misfits lead the box office for a second straight weekend as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 slipped a reasonable 57% from last weekend to an estimated $63M, bringing its total to $246M after 10 days. By comparison, the original fell 55% in its second weekend so even though sequels tend to front load their grosses, Guardians 2 seems to be holding on better than most. After 10 days the original was at $176M and ended its run at $333M. Following roughly the same trajectory, and realizing the box office at the beginning of the summer is more competitive than at the end of the summer, Guardians 2 could end at around $375-400M.
Second place belonged to the leading ladies of Snatched. The R-rated comedy starring Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn opened to a so-so $17.5M, according to estimates, from 3,501 theaters for a per screen average of $4,999. Critics were not kind as it currently sits at 36% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences didn’t seem too pleased either as it got a B CinemaScore. It doesn’t appear the counterprogramming to the male dominated summer blockbusters worked in this case. However, with a production budget around $40M, it will likely make back its money unlike…
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword which tanked this weekend grossing only an estimated $14.7M from 3,702 theaters for a per screen average of $3,971. Its production budget was in the $175M vicinity and while a lot of films these days make up their money overseas, King Arthur is dying there too as it opened to $29M from 51 markets this weekend. Critics liked this one even less as it stands at 28% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, yet audiences liked it a bit more as it got a B+ CinemaScore. Still, this one is in the running for biggest bomb of the year and it’s only the second week of May.
Holdovers, all with relatively small drops, took the next four places on the charts. Landing in fourth place was the multicultural crew of The Fate of the Furious which took in an estimated $5.3M in its fifth go around, bringing its cume up to $215M. In fifth place was The Boss Baby which added an estimated $4.6M to its coffers, bringing its total up to $162M after seven weeks. 2017s reigning champ fell to sixth place this weekend as Beauty and the Beast added another $3.86M, according to estimates, to its gargantuan total, bringing its cume up to $493M after nine weeks. Does it have enough left in the tank to become only the eighth film to hit the magical $500M mark? I’m gonna say yes. And in seventh place was How to be a Latin Lover which took in an estimated $3.75M bringing its total up to $26M after three weeks.
There was s surprise entry in the top 10 as the unheralded Lowriders ended in eighth place this weekend with an estimated $2.4M from only 295 theaters for a per screen average of $8,810, second best in the top 10. A PG-13 drama about lowrider car culture with virtually no stars managed to do some pretty good business. Ninth place belonged to the disappointing thriller The Circle which added an estimated $1.7M to its bank, bringing the total up to only $18.9M… which is virtually the same total as the final film in the top 10, the biggest Bollywood hit of all time, Baahubali 2: The Conclusion which made $1.5M from only 375 theaters this weekend, bringing its total to $18.93M. If I told you a few weeks ago that a Bollywood film that had a 167 minute running time and never play in more than 425 theaters would outgross a film starring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson, would you have believed me? Also, I never would have said it because I never would have imagined it happening.
The top ten films grossed an estimated $118M which was down 3.7% from last year when Captain America: Civil War remained at number one with $72.6M; and down 32.5% from 2015 when the ladies of Pitch Perfect 2 opened in the top spot with $69.2M.