Warner Bros announced Wednesday (5 April) that Jason Momoa would star in Minecraft – a film adaptation of the ultra-popular video game.
The movie has been slated for a 2025 release and will be directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre).
The announcement came as part of a wider reshuffle for the studio, which moved the release date of Momoa’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom forward five days to 20 December this year.
While the Minecraft adaptation has been on the shelf at Warner Bros for years, many fans reacted with surprise at Momoa’s casting.
“Live-Action Minecraft movie with Jason Momoa was not on my bingo card for 2025,” one person wrote on Twitter.
“There is not a single person on earth who looks at Minecraft Steve and thinks ‘I can really see Jason Momoa playing him,’” another posited.
Steve is the name of the game’s default character that players are given when they start.
“How is this real life?” Asked another fan reacting to the news.
Minecraft is the second-best-selling video game of all time after Tetris. According to Microsoft, the game has sold 238 million copies as of April 2021 across 22 available platforms.
The sandbox game allows players immense freedom to build virtual structures, machines and worlds.
Last year, The Independent reported that a teenager had created “the entire known universe” in Minecraft over the course of two months.
In 2020, over 100,000 created a life-size recreation of the Earth, bypassing the game’s built-in height limit to recreate Mount Everest and the Grand Canyon at their full scale.
Minecraft has been given a 4 April 2025 release.
