How to Build a Minecraft Movie Marketing Campaign
When Mojang Studios first built Minecraft in 2009, a feature film adaptation seemed like a distant dream. But fans of the world’s most popular video game know to never say Nethter.
April 4 brings the release of A Minecraft Movie, the first cinematic rendering of Mojang’s block-based open world. Directed by Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess and starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa, the Warner Bros.-backed live action film drops a quartet of travelers into a landscape that’s familiar to the more than 170 million active players who visit it every month on their computer screens.
Keeping the terrain familiar to those players was one of the guiding forces behind the Warner Bros.’ massive Minecraft Movie marketing campaign. Overseen by Dana Nussbaum, EVP of worldwide marketing, and Christian Davin, EVP of worldwide marketing strategy, the campaign includes partnerships with brands like McDonald’s and Poppi, in-game advertising, and activations at fan-centric events like Brazil’s CCXP convention.
“We looked at it through the lens of gamifying the campaign and making it fun and immersive,” Nussbaum told ADWEEK, pointing to the activations—which brought the game’s blocky characters and environments to life—as the purest example of that approach. “The No. 1 thing we were thinking was: ‘How do we blockify the world? We had to think outside the box—or, I guess, the block.”
“We wanted fans, content creators, and the press to be able to interact with the game in real life as you would in the virtual world,” echoed Davin. “The campaign was about ensuring that people could have the joy that comes with playing Minecraft.”
Game on
Minecraft is the latest property to ride the wave of video game adaptations that began in earnest with the inaugural Sonic the Hedgehog feature film in 2020. That Paramount-backed production famously took a time out on its nascent campaign when the initial design for Sega’s chili-dog chomping speed demon was met with widespread distaste among the Sonic faithful.
Within months, “Ugly Sonic” had been scrubbed from the movie in favor of a more familiar version of the character’s blue visage. Listening to fans awarded Paramount with a box office hit that has raced ahead to become one of the studio’s most lucrative franchises.
