How ‘The Minecraft Movie’ Became ‘Rocky Horror’ for TikTok Kids
A Minecraft Movie, based on the best-selling video game in the world, is, to put it lightly, an abomination. It currently sits at a “rotten” 48 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and Rolling Stone’s own review was far from glowing, calling it an “expensively cheap, 100-percent corporate mess.”
But despite the lackluster critical reception, it had the biggest video game movie opening weekend ever, with a record-breaking $157 million in the U.S. alone, surpassing The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) which also stars Jack Black, Uncharted (2022), and three Sonic The Hedgehog movies (2020, 2022, and 2024). It’s also making kids and teenagers go absolutely feral at the cinema.
In just its first weekend, the film has become a disruptive force, with young fans flocking in droves to not just watch Minecraft, but record themselves screaming and belly laughing at its many in-game references. A Minecraft Movie reactions are now a full-blown TikTok trend.
In videos that have spread like wildfire across social media after the film’s opening days, fans can be seen screaming lines like “I am Steve!” or “chicken jockey!” — to the likely confusion of anyone who’s never played a minute of Minecraft (or sat through their children’s explanations of it). The movie is packed to the brim with self-referential humor, both directly from the game and its community, as well as from the pre-release marketing push for the movie.
For anyone feeling lost, old, or generally confused as to what the hell’s going on, here’s a grown-up’s guide to all the references and moments in A Minecraft Movie that are driving fans wild.
What exactly is a “Chicken Jockey?”
The most viral trend to come out of A Minecraft Movie is for audiences to film themselves shouting, “Chicken jockey!” alongside Jack Black in the movie. The moment happens when Jason Momoa’s Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison finds himself in a wrestling ring with a chicken. Don’t worry about how or why this is happening — it just is. Slowly, a crate is lowered into the ring that contains a baby zombie, one of the deadliest enemies in the Minecraft game, despite its small stature. The block-headed creature lands on the chicken and rides it — it’s a chicken jockey.
Chicken Jockeys are an incredibly rare enemy to face in Minecraft. In the game’s survival mode, nighttime is deadly, and hostile foes can spawn randomly in dark areas. A baby zombie has just a five percent chance to spawn in the place of a regular zombie. The baby then has another five percent chance to spawn riding a chicken if one is in its immediate vicinity, and if none are present, it gets another five-percent chance to simply appear with a chicken it has brought out of the ether. All-in-all players have a roughly 0.25 to 0.4875-percent chance of encountering one during the game’s hostile nights.
The illustrious chicken jockey is a rare find in the Minecraft game.
Xbox Games Studios
While the average person without Minecraft experience would never get this reference, any player knows what these mythical creatures are, but most go years, or even their whole lives, without ever witnessing a chicken jockey spawn, so seeing it appear on-screen is a Big Deal. But the obnoxious TikTok trend that the sequence in the film has launched has led to cinemas issuing warnings that the police will be called to disrupted screenings.
And it’s actually happened. In a viral video on TikTok, police were called to a screening of the film in an unidentified theater in the U.S. when moviegoers erupted at Jack Black’s Steve saying a line that references a creature from the game. Kids threw popcorn, cheered, and gave a standing ovation, refusing to settle down even as the lights came on and the cops showed up.
Minecraft memes, TikTok terms, and in-game characters
The chicken jockey isn’t the only thing making gamers clap like seals, hooting and hollering in cinemas; there are loads of other lines and sights in the movie that kids are eating up. During the film’s opening monologue, Steve says, “As a child, I yearned for the mines.” This is a reference to a meme that started in 2022 from a tweet that read, “Minecraft proves that abolishing child labor was a mistake. The children yearn for the mines.”
This line sets up the tone for what’s to come at most screenings of the movie — kids and teenagers going absolutely wild, flinging popcorn like monkeys throwing their poop because of the excitement caused by every character sighting, in-joke from the game’s community, and now-memed catchphrases from the movie’s trailers that have been jammed into the 101-minute runtime.
Another line of dialogue prone to causing theaters to erupt is Jack Black’s infamous, “I am Steve” declaration from the movie’s first trailer. Streamer TommyInnit got Black to read many lines, but “I am Steve” is the one that resonated most, with one kid even standing right in front of the screen during the film’s end credits and shouting it to the cinema. The line itself isn’t actually from the game; Minecraft isn’t known for being dialogue-heavy.
Ghasts play a similar role in the game and film, serving as a mount for characters to fly on.
Xbox Games Studios
There’s also a conspicuous use of the term “unalive,” uttered by one of the film’s villains, General Chungus (Jared Hess). It’s become a way for social media users to navigate censorship, used in place of kill, murder, death, suicide, and other terms that relate to someone dying, which have been banned from use on platforms (specifically TikTok). In A Minecraft Movie, it’s both being used to keep a PG rating and to show the kids who are foregoing social norms to film TikToks of the movie as it’s screening that the writers, themselves, “get it.”
A ton of moments in the movie are based on actions lifted directly from the game, and these tend to get a big reaction out of the gamers too. When Steve saves the group from a deadly fall by throwing a bucket of water on the ground, it’s a reference to a popular survival trick employed by players like iShowSpeed, one of the most-popular streamers on the planet. Any fall damage in-game can be mitigated by landing in water or any depth, so most players keep a bucket of the wet stuff handy in case of an abrupt descent.
Minecraft recently added an update that allows players to ride the white, hot air balloon-looking flying creatures called Ghasts, and we see a lot of that in the movie. Slime blocks, like the one Steve uses to jump onto the wooden platform suspended from a Ghast, also bounce players in the game, and Henry even finds a Golden Apple in the Woodland Mansion, which is a valuable item that can help heal a player.
Kids’ favorite cameos
On top of the many trending lines that kids are howling in unison or filming for content, there are plenty of homages to popular YouTubers and Twitch streamers in A Minecraft Movie. Some people may have been scratching their heads when kids started screaming and crying after seeing a pig wearing a crown; With zombie pig men and skeleton archers riding spiders, why would this specific creature elicit such a guttural reaction? The crown pig is the YouTube icon of Technoblade (whose first name is Alexander, last name unknown), a creator who died from cancer in 2022. Steve’s response when asked if the pig is a king (“No, that’s a legend”) is a touching tribute to the late internet star for those familiar with his work.
One of Minecraft’s main developers, Jens “Jeb” Bergensten, also has a cameo during Jennifer Coolidge’s date with the villager. Bergensten can be seen in the background, and Coolidge’s remark that she thinks the villager is Swedish is a reference to Bergensten and Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson’s homeland of Sweden.
Technoblade’s Minecraft skin.
Xbox Games Studios; Technoblade
A final cameo happens during the film’s end-credit sequence, when Steve returns to his house in the real world after saving the Minecraft realm. The person who opens the door is Alex, the female protagonist players can choose to play as instead of Steve if they change their in-game costume.
But there’s one major cameo that fans expected to see that didn’t appear in the film. Streamer Valkyrae, who made a name for herself by playing Fortnite and also uploaded Minecraft videos before ultimately quitting the game in 2023, was due to have a small role in the movie, but it was evidently cut.
On a recent livestream, Valkyrae confirmed that she had, in fact, flown to New Zealand to film a brief cameo for the film that ultimately wasn’t used. The creator wouldn’t fully elaborate, telling her viewers, “Let’s just say I’m not gonna touch too much on it, but as much as you guys saw the other creators that were in it, would have been the equal amounts that you saw me in it, which is like 30 seconds. So, it’s okay.”
This is ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show for kids‘
Disruptive cinema screenings aren’t a new phenomenon. A huge part of fanaticism at theaters has been in communities turning out (and turning up) for their favorite movies; it’s something people have done since wielding lightsabers in darkly lit showings of Star Wars.
For cult hits, though, the impetus to act performatively with a group of people at a movie theater usually boils down to some kind of deeper inside joke or shared appreciation. Take for instance the blurred lines between ironic enjoyment and genuine fervor for movies like The Room (2003), where audiences have thrown plastic spoons whenever a background picture frame has a stock photo of a spoon in it.
A Minecraft Movie upholds a tradition of fandom going hog wild in movie theaters as a communal experience.
Warner Bros.
One of the most beloved movies built around rituals is The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), where audiences have sung along, danced to the “Time Warp,” and thrown toast, water, and toilet paper. It might go against everything cinephiles hold sacred, but perhaps theaters should lean into the group sense of lunacy A Minecraft Movie is inducing instead of running from it and issuing warnings.
Film critic Siddhant Adlakha tweeted, “Based on the in-theatre reactions, Minecraft appears to be a wild new case of self-referential success where part of the experience involves recognizing viral clips and lines carved from the movie itself, pre-release. Studios are going to try and fail to re-create this 1,000 times.”
Video game actor Roger Clark, best known as cowboy Arthur Morgan in Read Dead Redemption 2, aptly noted “The only cinematic experience I can compare the audience participation to is Rocky Horror, except it’s with teenagers and their phones and the movie is not even a weekend old.”
Some theaters already do “sing-a-longs” for musicals and cinemagoers have frequently dressed up in cosplay for the likes of Star Wars and Avengers. At a time when the box office is already struggling as patrons wait for movies to hit streaming services rather than going out and buying expensive tickets, cinema management should be more open-minded. Kids who want to partake in TikTok trends could be given their own screenings where they won’t bother the rest of us, and those with younger kids who are worried about things getting rowdy can sit comfortably knowing it’s not their screening that’ll have popcorn flung all over the place.
If you’re the kind of person who prefers the quiet, stoic cinema experience and wouldn’t scream your throat raw at the sight of a pink sheep or crowned pig, then this isn’t for you. Your chicken jockey is someplace else.
