Something wild is happening at the cinema this week: not just a bona fide blockbuster, but an audience-participation extravaganza of exploding enthusiasm that hasn’t been seen since “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” had midnight moviegoers doing “The Time Warp” in the aisles. In case you don’t know — and chances are, unless you are under 25 yourself or the parent of a teen or elementary-age kid you indeed don’t know — the movie is “Minecraft,” starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa in a ridiculous romp inspired by the incredibly popular video game of the same name.
Minecraft the game was introduced in 2009 but really boomed in the kiddie set around 2013 and 2014, which means that to the high schoolers of 2025 it was mother’s milk. What seems to be happening with the “Minecraft” movie phenomenon this month is that an avalanche of TikTok Minecraft memes, these super-familiar video-game characters the audience grew up with, and movie-star magic have collided — combusting into scenes inside theater auditoriums of highly impressive volume and interactive exuberance. Virtual-world fandom, social media trends, and the analog moviegoing experience cross over to create a Major Moviegoing Event.
We have seen the iPhone videos of what happens inside the cinema when Jack Black, up on the silver screen, utters the immortal phrase “chicken jockey.” Sheer joy. Sheer mayhem.
Don’t ask us what a chicken jockey is. We’re old. (Something to do with . . . a square-headed, green zombie baby . . . riding a chicken?) But we can say that despite being clueless and horrified by the mess we are not unhappy with this box office boom. Kids do still want to be together IRL. They do still want to participate in group activities. The movie theater may survive the internet after all.
Who remembers the director John Boorman’s wonderful, autobiographical 1987 movie “Hope and Glory,” about growing up in London during the Blitz, and that memorable movie-magic opening scene in which schoolchildren riot inside a cinema, throwing a blizzard of paper and popcorn into the air as a Pathé newsreel shows Neville Chamberlain wearing a top hat on the brink of war? Mr. Boorman’s cinema auditorium is a writhing mass of kids — kids shrieking and punching, kids pelting one another with candy, kids climbing over the seats — and that’s exactly the kind of almost-riot that broke out on opening night, Friday, of “Minecraft” at the Regal Cinema on Main Street.
With the teenagers’ unexpectedly sudden embrace of the analog moviegoing experience, the parents among us may need to ramp back up to speed when it comes to strong-arming the miscreants into picking up the candy wrappers and overturned popcorn buckets when the lights come up.