Minecraft creators Mojang have crafted a director for the forthcoming film based on their popular video game.
Rob McElhenney, creator and star of the sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, replaces Night at the Museum’s Shawn Levy, whose vision of a ”Goonies-style” adventure was apparently rejected by the Swedish game company.
Minecraft is a world-crafting game that has sold more than 35m copies. Players traverse a procedurally generated world, moving and combining blocks to create tools and structures. The game has become a popular teaching resource. McElhenney has not said how he plans to build a story based on the franchise.
The Minecraft film is being made by Mojang in partnership with Warner Bros Animation after the success of the studio’s The Lego Movie in 2014. McElhenney’s film is expected to be live action.
Fans who have previously attempted to bring Minecraft to the big screen have met opposition from Mojang. In February last year, a Kickstarter campaign seeking $600,000 was shut down after a request from the company. “We don’t allow … Kickstarters based on our IP without any deals in place,” co-founder Markus Persson wrote on Twitter.
Persson left Mojang last September after it was bought by Microsoft for $2.5bn. He wrote an emotional departing statement to his fans after announcing his exit: “I can’t be responsible for something this big. In one sense, it belongs to Microsoft now. In a much bigger sense, it’s belonged to all of you for a long time, and that will never change. It’s not about the money. It’s about my sanity.”
The Minecraft film is due out in 2017.
