A Minecraft Movie: Adult Supervision Required

What if I told you that theatres are enforcing the regulations of a rated R film onto… the Minecraft movie?

Remember when the most annoying kid in the theatre would just laugh during an emotional scene? Well, leave it to a cultural landmine like A Minecraft Movie to motivate mandates — ones that aren’t protect underage viewers from the content — but rather, to protect them from themselves — Oh, and chickens. To protect chickens from them, too.

How does a film simultaneously earn a 47% Rotten Tomatoes rating and $550 million in global box office? Even its biggest fans admit it wasn’t very good, but every 15 to 25-year-old and their mom knows the game, and that cultural relevance has been felt — From Saturday Night Live to Peabody awards. Still, give a few thousand kids a poultry-related inside joke and one of them will probably show up with a chicken.

“I thought it was just gonna be Jack Black saying a bunch of Minecraft lines,” my 17-year-old brother told me. “And that’s exactly what it was… And then the audience went crazy, but that’s what made it good.”

So, according to my brother who saw the film that I — admittedly — haven’t yet seen, it’s not exactly a cinematic masterpiece. But it does take quite a few beloved bits and gags out of their pixel world and into 4,263 theatres across the country. And that? Apparently a fine line.

So it all starts with a scene where Jason Momoa and Jack Black are in the boxing ring with a Creeper — a Minecraft species who falls out of a box, landing on a flightless bird — to which Momoa and Black announce, “Chiicken Jockkeyy…!” and the crowd goes wild.

The teenagers, prepared and armed with toilet paper, streamers, buckets of popcorn and, yes, even live chickens, go absolutely nuts.

Now, similarly to Fifty Shades of Grey, minors who wish to see A Minecraft Movie must be accompanied by a parent or “responsible adult” and will occasionally sit through a pre-movie warning screen. At one theatre, Jack Black himself appeared — in the flesh — to warn the audience: “Please no throwing popped corn, and also no Lapis Lazuli, and absolutely no chicken jockey.”