Two things immediately occurred to me when I saw the for . First, I can't believe my supposed pals at PC Gamer made me write about this. And second, why is it called A Minecraft Movie? Why not The Minecraft Movie? It is, after all, the Minecraft movie.
It turns out there's actually a reason, and it even sort of makes sense. "We’re calling it ‘A Minecraft Movie’ because we’re respecting the fact that there’s no one story that drives the game," Legendary Entertainment's chairman of worldwide production Mary Parent told .
Jared Hess, the director of A Minecraft Movie, concurred. "We’re not canonizing anything. We’re just one of a zillion stories."
That approach to Minecraft's non-canon extends to Jack Black, who portrays Steve in the film—but just one of many Steves. Mojang senior director of original content Torfi Frans Ólafsson said Black's character was originally a talking pig, and he didn't become Steve until "very, very, very late in the development," because the film "needed an expert and host." But Black, like the film itself, is not really Steve—he's a Steve.
"This is not my Steve or your Steve—this is Jack Black’s Steve," Ólafsson said. "A lot of fans responded when they saw the first teasers and trailers, like, 'Hey, wait a minute—this is just Jack Black. This isn’t Jack Black being someone else.' And maybe it is, because this is literally him interpreting this character [[link]] and what it means to him."
One might argue that Jack Black plays Jack Black in pretty much everything he appears in, but apparently he took the role seriously: The Variety report says he went "full Method" on set, and when Ólafsson got Xbox consoles and set up private Minecraft servers for the cast and crew, Black "was just completely manic" with the game, putting more than 100 hours into it—not a lot by some measures, but quite a bit when you're supposed to be making a movie.