A Minecraft Movie from director Jared Hess is on a roll at the box-office and on its way to being one the biggest blockbusters of 2025. Wētā FX gave me a behind-the-scenes look at their work on the film, including what makes some characters or creatures their personal favorites.
Minecraft Mines Box Office Gold
To catch up briefly, after its fourth weekend added an impressive $60 million worldwide, A Minecraft Movie has captured enough audience imagination and love to make it a contender for the year’s top spots on the box office charts, with a $900+ million finish looking very possible now.
Much contributed to A Minecraft Movie’s enormous success, including obviously the fact Minecraft is the best-selling video game in history, the time and patience that went into writing and developing the film project to make sure it was done right, and of course the talented cast and crew who elevated the entire proceedings.
But no doubt, the success of the film depended heavily on its acceptance as having faithfully and accurately adapted the world of Minecraft, but in a way faithful to the game but also faithful to what will attract mainstream movie audiences who haven’t played the game.
And doing that meant interpreting the block-based world of Minecraft perfectly, threading a needle to make everybody happy. Who do you call in such a moment? You call Wētā FX.
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
Minecraft The Wētā Way
Some background: Wētā FX handled major visual effects in A Minecraft Movie. VFX Supervisors Sheldon Stopsack and Simon Jung, animation Supervisor Kevin Estey, and the rest of their Wētā team completed a total of 456 shots for the film, blending classic block-based Minecraft style locations and creatures with live-action footage.
I had the opportunity to ask Stopsack and Estey some questions about their work on A Minecraft Movie, and I’m including those discussions here and in another article later this week continuing our look at Minecraft’s success, the role of VFX in helping create that success, and Wētā FX’s probable Oscar nomination for their work on the film.
One brilliant aspect of Wētā’s work that’s an organic extension of the Minecraft world itself: the team developed a new technology called ‘Blokz’ in Houdini, specifically designed to convert standard geometry into Minecraft-style blockified shapes.
Wētā designed and developed the expansive Overworld environment in A Minecraft Movie as well, featuring 64 different terrains and all sorts of environments integrated into the continuous cinematic world. The final big battle sequence effects work by Digital Domain used Wētā’s environment assets as well.
“Minecraft was certainly unique and not the ‘ordinary’ visual effects movie you would typically expect to work on,” Stopsack said. “This is mostly attributed to the underlying key question we had to ask ourselves, how do we combine and honor the well-established aesthetic of the world’s most popular video game with live-action sets and performers?”
Stopsack continued, “Since none of us had a clear answer to this question at the start, we started off with something that was fairly true to the game. Our Models team prototypes a toolset that would become known as the BLOKZ Tool. This method allowed us to turn geometry into a pointcloud. Each point would then be replaced with individual cubes. We ended up creating a fairly extensive inventory of different block types inspired by common material types you find in the game.”
With such innovative tech, Wētā’s team was able to create a library consisting of a wide variety of different Minecraft game biomes. “All of this,” Stopsack explained, “initially resulted in pretty abstract and very blocky assets… Our Teams explored adjustments along the lines of playing with scale, size, material distribution, jitter, erosion and so on… creating large scale assets that even at distance provided a pleasant block-like aesthetic.”
Blocks in hand, Wētā’s approach took a more nuanced approach as well. “But it also introduced a more natural organic quality with imperfections and increased complexity that you would observe in the real world,” Stopsack added.
The work had to transpire concurrently with the live-action production, to ensure seamless blending of visuals. “All of this happened alongside the making of practical set builds,” Stopsack noted. “We wanted all of our environments to be grounded in what you would find in the game. Our Pre-Production Team spent a lot of time scouting for different Biomes… If you pay close attention [when the cast arrive in the Overworld], you will recognise Badlands, Grasslands, Snowy Mountains and other Biomes inspired by Game itself.”
One standout creation for A Minecraft Movie was the villain Malgosha, whose detailed textures and distinctive cloak, Wētā explains, were carefully crafted to translate Rachel House’s live-action performance into the character. Malgosha and her Piglin henchmen live in a cavernous land called the Nether, for the uninitiated.
Estey said of Malgosha, “[She] was by far the most involved character we created for the film, and she was the product of the skilled input from a huge team of talented people, both within Weta FX and from outside, who helped bring her to life.” He added, “The initial idea Jared [Hess] had was for a villain somewhere between the crotchety, motherly villain Mama Fratelli from The Goonies, a wretch like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, with a creepiness like the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal.”
Malgosha’s design held special resonance for Estey, it turns out. “Those three references are very close to my heart,” he explained. “As a kid, I was enamored by the magic of ’80s fantasy films and dreamed of being a filmmaker. During our early conversations, I discovered that [the director] Jared and I were born in the U.S. in the same year, and our shared love for those movies gave us a fundamental understanding of each other.”
For Estey, the shared background gave him clearer insights into the filmmaker’s vision of the film and its main villain. “Our art department explored many variations based on Jared’s brief,” Estey said, “before we landed on a design that struck a great balance: creepy, macabre, yet silly—and, of course, blocky.”
Stopsack added, “From a VFX professional point of view, it’s easy to say Malgosha was the most challenging, but also rewarding, character to work on. Finding her personality was a long journey that required us to interpret and combine a wide range of facets and input from people involved.”
Pointing to Estey’s examples of past film influences, Stopsack said, “Our Art Department took the lead on her character design… With her signature of a refrigerator-sized hunchback, her oversized cloak played a key role in her appearance.”
After the costumers designed a practical cloak to be wornduring performances, it turned out too heavy for regular use, but still provided a perfect reference for Wētā’s team.
“Numerous motion studies and explorations were undertaken before principal photography took place,” Stopsack contined, “It was only then when she really came to life. With Allen Henry acting as her proxy on set and during our Motion Capture session, we really saw the tone of her and who she ultimately wanted to be.”
Pairing Henry’s performance and House’s “required us to carefully combine these various inputs and forge in to a convincing and compelling single performance and character,” he finished.
This week, I’ll have a continued deep-dive into A Minecraft Movie’s world and how much audiences are responding to it in my follow-up about Wētā’s work, including much more about the characters, the hard work integrating VFX into the live-action, and a lot of the fun the team had with certain characters – including getting their own families involved. So be sure to check back soon for that coverage, and if you’re fan don’t miss my home release review for Minecraft, with additional behind-the-scenes looks.
A Minecraft Movie should top $900 million by the end of its run. When it does, and when it’s among the finalists for the top grossing films of 2025, it will be in big part due to the tremendous visual effects work done by Wētā FX.
