During Minecraft Live 2024, the first non-trailer footage for “A Minecraft Movie” was released on Sept. 28, and it has raised my expectations of the movie by a tiny fraction.

The clip shows Steve (Jack Black) showing off how to use the crafting table to Garrett Garrison (Jason Momoa) and Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen)

Steve crafts an iron sword before Garrett dumps several pieces of iron onto the crafting table and creates two chained buckets, an item not in Minecraft. 

The footage gave me a marginally higher expectation for the movie than before, which is to say I didn’t expect it to be better than absolutely abhorrent, however the footage at least did a better job at showing the movie than the trailer. 

The first trailer for the movie, which released on Sept. 4, did not do a good job at selling the movie in my opinion. The trailer was mediocre at best, it didn’t look like a high budget film but more like the kind of mockup you’d see for a Minecraft in real life video or a bad texture pack, in the case of the sheep. The movie looked bland and uninspired.

While the trailer did nothing for me, the clip was a good example of the sandbox mechanics of Minecraft. It shows the idea as described in the movie, that anything you can imagine you can create, with the crafting table being a small example of the wider world.

While I still don’t expect much from the movie, the new preview at least makes me think that it could at least okay. 

“A Minecraft Movie” uses live action characters in a 3D animated world as opposed to using full 3D animation, which I believe would have been a better approach.

For now I’m still expecting the movie to be bad, but if the movie shows more scenes like this, showcasing the creative potential in Minecraft as a sandbox, then I think it can be a good movie. 

“A Minecraft Movie” is in theaters April 4.