Yes, you read that correctly.
A movie about a pixelated mining game made more than $300 million globally on its opening weekend, over twice the reported budget of the film.
Meanwhile, Disney's "Snow White" remake struggled to add a few million measly dollars on its third weekend.
As it turns out, making a movie for the fan base without concern about modern sociopolitical commentary or "diversity" or "inclusion" actually makes money!
Hordes of young men took to theaters to watch the film. Their unruly reactions made headlines themselves:
The "Chicken Jockey" scene, where a little zombie rides a chicken in a cage fight (again, this is a movie based off a simplistic mine-and-build game made for kids) actually got police involved in several instances.
Let's be clear: This movie is slop.
If you still need context, watch this clip:
Sometimes, slop works. Slop can be funny. I'm not against well-done slop, if that makes sense. 😂
After all, Minecraft isn't a game meant for sophisticated thinkers. It's a game where boys can tap out from the real world, which has nothing but hate for them, and scratch the masculine urge to build new worlds without being lectured by the woke Message™.
Warner Brothers took a silly game meant for prepubescent boys, made the corniest, sloppiest plot of an action adventure movie ever, and then put it out there and made a killing.
But the fact that young men are so hungry for stories that speak to them (and woke stories don't speak to them) says something about the current cultural moment.
Parents are even posting messages like this to emphasize how their sons were captivated by this film 👇
So ... what does this mean? Why does it deserve an op-ed on Not the Bee?
Let's start with this premise:
Stories are the heart of a civilization.
This has been true for every place throughout all of history. If a nation does not have shared stories, then it is not a nation. A common tapestry of history and fictional tales provides the backbone of moral grounding for any culture.
Over the last century and a half, the West has cast off its shared stories. The Marxist (woke) experiment has told us:
God is dead, so there is no need for the redemptive story, moral historical lessons, or hope of eternal life found in the Bible.
Western civilization is evil, so there is no need to study "dead old white men," let alone read great works of art like The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf, Shakespeare, The Canterbury Tales, or Le Morte d'Arthur (about King Arthur).
In the burning away of those cultural tapestries, the post-modernists hoped to create a new age with a New Man. They wanted to remake the world according to their own image.
But here in the West, that mind virus had difficulty taking root. The old order, with its moral lessons on virtue and salvation and duty was not easily overthrown.
While King David, King Arthur, and Hercules were done away with, they were replaced by heroes like Superman, Aragorn son of Arathorn, Aslan, and Luke Skywalker.
All of these heroes embodied the Christian ethos, whether it was purposeful or not. Some writers, like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, purposely crafted their stories to be banners of Christian hope in an era of post-modern slop, believing that the Truth Myth would win out against the atheistic, communist drivel.
(And it did.)
This, then, is why the woke Marxists have tried so hard to destroy that ember of Christian light in the stories that fan flames into the hearts of young men.
Luke Skywalker? Make him a sad old man who drinks green milk.
Superman? He's gay and/or a climate refugee.
Indiana Jones? Also a sad old man.
Lord of the Rings? Aragorn's great ancestor Isildur needs to be saved by an elf of color.
Aslan? The son of the Emperor-Beyond-The-Sea is apparently Meryl Streep now.
The activists making these films aren't hiding what they are doing.
The point in taking over these male-majority "franchises" is purposeful and methodical.
And yet, despite it all, Hollywood has not been able to drive out the burning desire for real stories - for stories that speak to the heart of valor and adventure and truth and virtue. It turns out that these traits and values, like human nature, are fixed and immovable. They do not and can not change.
Men in particular have need of such stories. Men do not orient themselves in the world based on relationships like women do. They seek a purpose - a quest - with a reward in mind, and they seek to orient themselves rightly before they set out on that quest, which includes forming brotherhoods with other men who share their goals.
This is how men approach education, careers, dating and marriage, filling out their fantasy football picks, building castles in Minecraft, or lifting at the gym. Everything is defined by the quest.
If that is confusing, let this old meme explain:
Without stories that temper and hone that masculine drive for questing into something virtuous but deadly, you get weak men who are either useless or bloodthirsty. As C.S. Lewis put it in The Necessity of Chivalry,
If we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections — those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be 'meek in hall', and those who are 'meek in hall' but useless in battle — for the third class, who are both brutal in peace and cowardly in war, need not here be discussed. When this dissociation of the two halves of Launcelot occurs, history becomes a horribly simple affair.
The slop of the Minecraft movie is indicative that young men in 2025, like young men at every point in human history, desire stories that teach them about meaning and knighthood and virtue and destiny, even if it means watching Jason Momoa fight a blocky zombie on a chicken.
Hollywood got rid of all the male heroes, but young men are latching on to new heroes nonetheless. The problem is, if you leave them eating the slop like the Prodigal Son who found himself eating with the pigs, you won't get Lancelots.
And yet, that is likely what Hollywood is going to do next. Seeing the failure of the woke experiment, I expect studios to turn to junk-food films to chase after financial success, not understanding that the consequences of too much slop will be just as bad as woke.
If anyone in Hollywood is reading, make tales that matter instead.
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.
