Jared Hess' 'A Minecraft Movie' Proves Again that Failing Upwards Is a Hollywood Superpower

I have not seen A Minecraft Movie yet. I was supposed to review it over the weekend, but Influenza-B invaded my home and I’m the only one (so far) left standing to care for everyone. A two-hour trip to the theater, even for work, wouldn’t have reflected well. When I eventually do see it, I have no idea how I’ll feel, though the 48 percent on Rotten Tomatoes suggests critics aren’t fans. The 88 percent audience score suggests otherwise, though many of the audience reviews echo the Gen-Z word salad my 17-year-old has been ironically quoting for months: “Absolute Cinema!!!!” and “I AM STEVE. FLINT AND STEEL.”

The movie, however, smashed all sorts of box-office records, racking up $162 million domestically and over $300 million worldwide, besting The Super Mario Bros. Movie for the biggest opening of any video-game adaptation ever.

It just goes to show: You don’t have to be a good director to make a huge blockbuster. Hollywood is littered with mediocre filmmakers who’ve helmed massive hits. The Russo Brothers — directors of The Gray Man, The Electric State, and Cherry — also directed two of the six highest-grossing films of all time: Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Does it matter that they don’t have a particularly distinctive style, or that they function more like factory managers than creative visionaries? Apparently not. In fact, they’ve been hired to direct the next two Avengers films, likely because creative visionaries tend to get in the way (see Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the original Solo directors, who were pushed out for being, well, too creative).

Remember Colin Trevorrow? Director of Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Dominion, and the poster boy for failing upwards (see Book of Henry for proof).

And then there’s Jared Hess. It’s been over two decades, but Hess is still best remembered, and probably always will be, for his debut, Napoleon Dynamite, a movie that caught fire by being just quirky and annoying enough (during a golden age of quirky and annoying) to ride the precious indie film wave. I’ll admit: I loved it at the time. Haven’t revisited it. Probably shouldn’t.

It’s been a long twenty years since, and Hess has repeatedly put his “creative vision” to work with spectacularly bad results. Jack Black fans have a soft spot for Nacho Libre, though I’ve never understood why. It’s a boring, unfunny two-hour SNL sketch built around a terrible accent, occasionally salvaged by Black’s manic energy and a couple of Tenacious D songs. It earned $80 million, far more than it deserved, while landing just 39 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Then came Gentleman Broncos, his follow-up three years later, which somehow managed to be worse. Despite a cast that included Jemaine Clement, Jennifer Coolidge, and Mike White, we never even reviewed it here because no one saw it. It scored 20 percent with critics and made only $100,000 at the box office. Do people even know this movie exists? Or that this is where Mike White and Jennifer Coolidge met? That’s the only good thing to come out of it.

Speaking of White Lotus pairings, after six years in director’s jail, Hess resurfaced with Don Verdean, starring Sam Rockwell and Leslie Bibb, along with Will Forte, Jemaine Clement, and Danny McBride. No one liked that one either. It scored 30 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and made just $30,000 at the box office. Not $30 million. Thirty thousand dollars.

Having two bombs that big, back-to-back, could’ve ended most careers. But Hess had already started production on his next movie before the notices and anemic receipts rolled in. That film? Masterminds, one of the worst wastes of talent I’ve ever seen. Zach Galifianakis, Owen Wilson, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Jason Sudeikis. “There’s barely a laugh in the entire film, which looks like it was shot in one take while the actors were still working out their characters,” I wrote in 2015. “It’s a farce that never farces; a comedy without jokes. It’s 90 minutes of mugging for the camera, but the only people who feel mugged are those who pay to see Masterminds.”

It scored 39 percent on RT and, despite arriving at the height of Galifianakis’s Hangover fame, earned just $17 million, well below the studio’s modest $25 million investment.

And yet, after another decade mostly limited to a few TV episodes and last year’s forgettable Netflix animated film Thelma the Unicorn, someone gave Jared Hess $150 million to make A Minecraft Movie.

And it worked.

And maybe this should be a story of redemption — a triumphant comeback for a long-forgotten director. But honestly, notwithstanding the box-office receipts owed largely to the massive IP and Jack Black and Jason Momoa’s combined wattage, it feels like just another example of failing upwards. After Hess churns through a couple of A Minecraft Movie sequels with diminishing returns, he’ll be given two or three more opportunities to put that creative vision to work. My guess is that he’ll underperform again.