Looks like the much-anticipated Minecraft film is under construction again. The previous script from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Mac (Rob McElhenney) and Wonder Woman writer Jason Fuchs has been scrapped and is being rewritten again. McElhenney has left the project, and Warner Bros. has hired a new team to take on the project. The Warner Bros. project based on the open-ended game world made of pixelated building blocks has been in development since 2014.
Rob McElhenney told The Wrap of his exit, after being attached to the project for almost two years. The movie would have been the Sunny star's first effort with motion picture directing. Warner Bros' has chosen Aaron and Adam Nee to write the new script to replace McElhenney and Fuchs. The Nee brothers are best-known for their 2015 film Band of Robbers, and are directing Sony's upcoming Masters of the Universe. With this sudden change in direction for the film, Minecraft will likely see a push back from its previous release date of May 24, 2019.
This certainly isn't the first setback the Warner Bros. film has faced. In 2014, director of the Night of the Museum movies, Shawn Levy, exited the project due to creative differences. His exit came after he pitched his vision, a Goonies-inspired adventure, to the Minecraft game-makers, and it didn't match their ideas. With Levy's family-focused projects, his direction would have been a good fit for the game's kid-friendly appeal, and might have followed in the footsteps of The Lego Movie. In 2016, with Fuchs and McElhenney newly onboard, the film seemed like it might have found a good blend between an experienced adventure script-writer and long-running comedy creator, especially drawing in Sunny fans, accustomed to the show's mature silliness.
After the success of The Lego Movie, the studio is hoping to explore more adaptations stemming from video games, with their eyes closely set on the continued mass-popularity of Minecraft. Luckily, Warner Bros. does have another kid-friendly video game adaptation still set to hit theaters in May 2019 to fall back on. The studio recently acquired Detective Pikachu from Universal, which stars Ryan Reynolds as Pikachu and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom's Justice Smith as his trainer solving crimes together, based on the Great Detective Pikachu video game.
Movies based on video games has certainly been a growing Hollywood trend but hasn't always faired to be as good of products as their source material. In 2018 alone, Tomb Raider and Rampage delivered on the promise of being action-packed releases, but didn't quite become exploding successes. With the film currently entering its third set of rewrites with this announcement, fans may be questioning if it will ever hit the big screen.
