April 21, 2025 • 9 mins
Minecraft is a super popular vidoogame that has long been a favorite of video gamers world wide. But the movie version has debuted to huge tickets sales at theaters all over the world. While it does star Jack Black and Jason Momoa and was directed by Jared Hess (Nacho Libre, Napoleon Dynamiite) it's not the stars or the director that's the appeal. It's the Minecraft brand.
To explain this phenomena, John Wesley Downey brings in Zach Killian, the creator of the highly popular You Tube Channel WOW SUCH GAMING to discuss the game's populaiirty and it's transfer to the big screen.
This is part one of a two part interview. In part two, Zach will talk about his video gaming channel, Zombies and the classic Zombie movie, SHAUN OF THE DEAD.
Enjoy this podcast on the giant box office success of Minecraft and follow this podcast channel (hit the follow button) so you won't miss part two and Zombies and Shaun of tghe Dead.
Thanks for listening!
JohnDowney2@iheartmedia.com
To explain this phenomena, John Wesley Downey brings in Zach Killian, the creator of the highly popular You Tube Channel WOW SUCH GAMING to discuss the game's populaiirty and it's transfer to the big screen.
This is part one of a two part interview. In part two, Zach will talk about his video gaming channel, Zombies and the classic Zombie movie, SHAUN OF THE DEAD.
Enjoy this podcast on the giant box office success of Minecraft and follow this podcast channel (hit the follow button) so you won't miss part two and Zombies and Shaun of tghe Dead.
Thanks for listening!
JohnDowney2@iheartmedia.com
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the True Film Fan Podcast. Today we're going
to talk about the tremendous box office success of the
debut of Minecraft, and we're going to be talking with
an expert on it that I know is going to
give us a lot of insight into that. Just a
reminder to follow our podcast here so that you never
miss an episode of it. You can do that just
by hitting follow or subscribe on your computer or smartphone.
(00:22):
And let's get right to our subject at hand, with
our expert and from the world headquarters of Wow Such Gaming,
a YouTube channel that's been very successful in the last
couple of years. We have a colleague of mind, Zach Killian.
We used to work together in our broadcast lives and
Zach has gone on to great success on the internet
with his gaming channel. How you doing tonight, Zach.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Doing pretty good? I appreciate all the kind words.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Well good. You probably know more about video games than
anybody else I know on this earth. So something happened
last weekend. There was an eruption in the movie industry
because something pretty extraordinary took place. I know that that
they've been making movies out of video games on and
off for many years, but something pretty special happened with
(01:06):
a video game called Minecraft, and I thought we talk
a little bit about that. First of all, can you
give maybe our listeners who are not familiar with Minecraft
a description of the game.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
So when it comes to Minecraft, because back when I
was in college, it was my sophomore year of college,
I remember my roommate back in the day, this was
twenty eleven, twenty twelve, going into twenty twelve, he was like,
there's this game called Minecraft. He can build stuff, he
can dig, you can create, you can survive into the
net because every there's a day and night cycle. Zombies
(01:39):
pop up in the night. You can build hideouts, and
there's a whole lot of stuff. It's really hard to describe,
but the gist of it is imagine how you were
with Legos, but now it is amplified. You can do
a lot of stuff build, there's like water, mechanics, all
of this stuff. So it's basically your imagination going wild
(02:03):
with blots.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Basically, it's almost like they put up a canvas in Uh. Well,
I guess it could be people of any age, but
especially kids seem to love it.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Right because back in twenty twelve, when it really blew
up around twenty twelve, twenty thirteen when it first came out,
and a lot of people have grown up with it.
I my girlfriend her son started playing Minecraft seven months
ago and he can't put it down. He loves playing
it because there's just a lot of stuff that give
(02:34):
them joy. So it's this mixture of you have people
that grew up with it watching tons of you. If
you go on YouTube typeing anything Minecraft, you'll find stuff
with one hundreds of millions, even billions of views of
just music videos and all that. So you have all
this building up to it, and Minecraft is just a
cultural phenomenon I see.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
So it's sort of like, in a way, you could
even say it's an extension of something Hollywood has always done,
because from the beginning of Hollywood, if there was a
very popular novel, that was an ideal candidate for making
a movie, because in fact, it's pre sold, the audience
knows what it's getting before they go to the theater.
So in the case of Minecraft, it's the same thing,
(03:15):
but it's just on this incredible global scale and with
this incredibly large audience. So did it surprise you that
it did so well?
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Honestly, because I've heard it many times. There is this
list of the top selling video games in human history,
and sometimes you'll hear Tetris is up there. But that's
because it's been sold time and time and time and
time again through every console generation. Everything you think of,
Tetris has been on it. But you can't really count
it as a singular entity. But Minecraft, it has been
one game consistently since twenty eleven, and it is number
(03:50):
one in human history. It has sold three hundred and
fifty million copies. The only one that is behind it
is Grand Theft thout or five, and that's only two
hundred and ten, and so that shows you how many
people have interacted with the game itself. Now, when it
comes to being surprised about it, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
I suspect it's gonna end up being one of the
biggest movies of the year. It's already the biggest video
game movie I think ever, as far as its debut goes.
And then also it was number it was number one
at the box office. And the interesting thing about that is,
you know there's people in the movie industry that they
(04:31):
have all these tables and research and everything, and they
usually try to make a prediction on how much a
movie is going to open and they were awesome. Yeah,
it was like way out of scale. It was so
far out of scale they couldn't believe it. So I
guess that guarantees us there'll be a Minecraft too. How
(04:51):
much do you play it or have you?
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I used to play it a lot because there's two
aspects to it. You can either sit there and gold
and make all these kinds of I love, like just
making mansions. You're trying to make scale models of existing places.
Or you can go you go into this place called
the nether the under where you create stuff. You end
up fighting a dragon in the end. It's there's a
whole lot to it. I never even explored because I
(05:14):
just liked building. But I've enjoyed it. But I have
other games I get into because I'm a zombie channel.
I like zombie games, FoST apocalyptics. I have done a
Minecraft video because there is technically zof piece, but you know.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
I see, so it's sort of the it's sort of
the holy grail of video games in terms of commercial appeal.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Oh yeah, because you're talking earlier about adapt again, adaptations,
They've been done time and time again since the eighties,
they did the Mario Brothers movie that was It's so
bad it's good in my opinion.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Yeah, that did really well at the box offisode, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (05:56):
It actually did not. It underperformed because they made the
horrible mistake of releasing a dinosaur related movie a week
before Jurassic Park.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Oh yeah, not a good thing there. This brings up
an interesting question there seems to be Okay, if you
describe the way you described Minecraft, it wouldn't seem to
me that that's an obvious choice for creating a narrative
on the big screen. What's the story potential there?
Speaker 2 (06:28):
So I was actually going to get into that with you,
because video game adaptations when you when you adapt novels
and you adapt books like Harry Potter, he has a
hardcore fan basis, and like, Okay, you're obviously going to
have to change something short and stuff down or outright
gut stuff because you have to fit it into an
hour and a half thing, And who knows if you
got a sequel. That's They did that with the Mario movie.
(06:51):
They did with Sonic Movies. They've done a lot of
video game adaptations, but with Minecraft, there's not really a story.
It's more of the sandbox and what the sandboxes and
games is. You just put yourself in and go do
whatever you want. There's not many there's not anything that
talks to you. You just build and buy stuff. And
(07:12):
so when it comes to adapting that, they had all
the free reign in the world to just do whatever
they want, and I think that gave it the biggest
advantage because you're not gonna anger anybody that's going to
go in, because you also have a large kid audience
that they don't care if it's fine, if it's referencing
what's in the game, they're happy with it. And people
(07:34):
that are going older. You have Jack Black going in
with Jason Momoo. There's only a couple of concrete characters.
There's the main male character named Steve and another female
named Alex. Jack Black was the male character, but there's
no personality to them. They're just kind of blink slights
that you can put yourself into. So they had a
(07:54):
lot of creative liberty to go with.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
I see. Do you think there are other major video
games laying around that are just dying to be made
into movies? Anything come to mind?
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Honestly, I was being in the game community. There is
a lot of toxicity when it comes to changing narratives
and whatnot. The Last of Us is coming out next
or coming out here soon with their second season HBO,
that did numbers, but there was a lot of controversy
with the second game of how it handled its characters,
(08:27):
and there was a whole lot of political strife, so
translating into that, so when it comes to adapting a
lot of narrative games, you have to be really careful
because it is hard. I would say out of all
the forms of media, gamers are the hardest to make happy.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah people, It's interesting how protective and territorial and possessive
they get of their intellectual property that they enjoy, isn't it.
It's quite something. I'm sure somebody will do a psycholte
study of it at some point. We're talking with Zach
keillyon He is the proprietor of the Wow Such gaming
(09:06):
YouTube channel, extremely popular, and I want to thank Zach
for being on the show today, for being my video
game expert and talking about Minecraft. However, pay attention to
this programming. Note. We're not done with Zach. I'm going
to have him on my next podcast, and we're going
to talk about his gaming channel, Wow Such Gaming. And
we're also going to talk about zombie movies and his
(09:27):
and mine's favorite zombie movie, Sean of the Dead. So
hit that follow button or subscribe button so that you
get all of our podcasts here and be delivered right
to your device. Thank you for listening. I'm John Wissey
Downy and this is true film fan
Welcome to the True Film Fan Podcast. Today we're going
to talk about the tremendous box office success of the
debut of Minecraft, and we're going to be talking with
an expert on it that I know is going to
give us a lot of insight into that. Just a
reminder to follow our podcast here so that you never
miss an episode of it. You can do that just
by hitting follow or subscribe on your computer or smartphone.
(00:22):
And let's get right to our subject at hand, with
our expert and from the world headquarters of Wow Such Gaming,
a YouTube channel that's been very successful in the last
couple of years. We have a colleague of mind, Zach Killian.
We used to work together in our broadcast lives and
Zach has gone on to great success on the internet
with his gaming channel. How you doing tonight, Zach.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Doing pretty good? I appreciate all the kind words.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Well good. You probably know more about video games than
anybody else I know on this earth. So something happened
last weekend. There was an eruption in the movie industry
because something pretty extraordinary took place. I know that that
they've been making movies out of video games on and
off for many years, but something pretty special happened with
(01:06):
a video game called Minecraft, and I thought we talk
a little bit about that. First of all, can you
give maybe our listeners who are not familiar with Minecraft
a description of the game.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
So when it comes to Minecraft, because back when I
was in college, it was my sophomore year of college,
I remember my roommate back in the day, this was
twenty eleven, twenty twelve, going into twenty twelve, he was like,
there's this game called Minecraft. He can build stuff, he
can dig, you can create, you can survive into the
net because every there's a day and night cycle. Zombies
(01:39):
pop up in the night. You can build hideouts, and
there's a whole lot of stuff. It's really hard to describe,
but the gist of it is imagine how you were
with Legos, but now it is amplified. You can do
a lot of stuff build, there's like water, mechanics, all
of this stuff. So it's basically your imagination going wild
(02:03):
with blots.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Basically, it's almost like they put up a canvas in Uh. Well,
I guess it could be people of any age, but
especially kids seem to love it.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Right because back in twenty twelve, when it really blew
up around twenty twelve, twenty thirteen when it first came out,
and a lot of people have grown up with it.
I my girlfriend her son started playing Minecraft seven months
ago and he can't put it down. He loves playing
it because there's just a lot of stuff that give
(02:34):
them joy. So it's this mixture of you have people
that grew up with it watching tons of you. If
you go on YouTube typeing anything Minecraft, you'll find stuff
with one hundreds of millions, even billions of views of
just music videos and all that. So you have all
this building up to it, and Minecraft is just a
cultural phenomenon I see.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
So it's sort of like, in a way, you could
even say it's an extension of something Hollywood has always done,
because from the beginning of Hollywood, if there was a
very popular novel, that was an ideal candidate for making
a movie, because in fact, it's pre sold, the audience
knows what it's getting before they go to the theater.
So in the case of Minecraft, it's the same thing,
(03:15):
but it's just on this incredible global scale and with
this incredibly large audience. So did it surprise you that
it did so well?
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Honestly, because I've heard it many times. There is this
list of the top selling video games in human history,
and sometimes you'll hear Tetris is up there. But that's
because it's been sold time and time and time and
time again through every console generation. Everything you think of,
Tetris has been on it. But you can't really count
it as a singular entity. But Minecraft, it has been
one game consistently since twenty eleven, and it is number
(03:50):
one in human history. It has sold three hundred and
fifty million copies. The only one that is behind it
is Grand Theft thout or five, and that's only two
hundred and ten, and so that shows you how many
people have interacted with the game itself. Now, when it
comes to being surprised about it, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
I suspect it's gonna end up being one of the
biggest movies of the year. It's already the biggest video
game movie I think ever, as far as its debut goes.
And then also it was number it was number one
at the box office. And the interesting thing about that is,
you know there's people in the movie industry that they
(04:31):
have all these tables and research and everything, and they
usually try to make a prediction on how much a
movie is going to open and they were awesome. Yeah,
it was like way out of scale. It was so
far out of scale they couldn't believe it. So I
guess that guarantees us there'll be a Minecraft too. How
(04:51):
much do you play it or have you?
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I used to play it a lot because there's two
aspects to it. You can either sit there and gold
and make all these kinds of I love, like just
making mansions. You're trying to make scale models of existing places.
Or you can go you go into this place called
the nether the under where you create stuff. You end
up fighting a dragon in the end. It's there's a
whole lot to it. I never even explored because I
(05:14):
just liked building. But I've enjoyed it. But I have
other games I get into because I'm a zombie channel.
I like zombie games, FoST apocalyptics. I have done a
Minecraft video because there is technically zof piece, but you know.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
I see, so it's sort of the it's sort of
the holy grail of video games in terms of commercial appeal.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Oh yeah, because you're talking earlier about adapt again, adaptations,
They've been done time and time again since the eighties,
they did the Mario Brothers movie that was It's so
bad it's good in my opinion.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Yeah, that did really well at the box offisode, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (05:56):
It actually did not. It underperformed because they made the
horrible mistake of releasing a dinosaur related movie a week
before Jurassic Park.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Oh yeah, not a good thing there. This brings up
an interesting question there seems to be Okay, if you
describe the way you described Minecraft, it wouldn't seem to
me that that's an obvious choice for creating a narrative
on the big screen. What's the story potential there?
Speaker 2 (06:28):
So I was actually going to get into that with you,
because video game adaptations when you when you adapt novels
and you adapt books like Harry Potter, he has a
hardcore fan basis, and like, Okay, you're obviously going to
have to change something short and stuff down or outright
gut stuff because you have to fit it into an
hour and a half thing, And who knows if you
got a sequel. That's They did that with the Mario movie.
(06:51):
They did with Sonic Movies. They've done a lot of
video game adaptations, but with Minecraft, there's not really a story.
It's more of the sandbox and what the sandboxes and
games is. You just put yourself in and go do
whatever you want. There's not many there's not anything that
talks to you. You just build and buy stuff. And
(07:12):
so when it comes to adapting that, they had all
the free reign in the world to just do whatever
they want, and I think that gave it the biggest
advantage because you're not gonna anger anybody that's going to
go in, because you also have a large kid audience
that they don't care if it's fine, if it's referencing
what's in the game, they're happy with it. And people
(07:34):
that are going older. You have Jack Black going in
with Jason Momoo. There's only a couple of concrete characters.
There's the main male character named Steve and another female
named Alex. Jack Black was the male character, but there's
no personality to them. They're just kind of blink slights
that you can put yourself into. So they had a
(07:54):
lot of creative liberty to go with.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
I see. Do you think there are other major video
games laying around that are just dying to be made
into movies? Anything come to mind?
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Honestly, I was being in the game community. There is
a lot of toxicity when it comes to changing narratives
and whatnot. The Last of Us is coming out next
or coming out here soon with their second season HBO,
that did numbers, but there was a lot of controversy
with the second game of how it handled its characters,
(08:27):
and there was a whole lot of political strife, so
translating into that, so when it comes to adapting a
lot of narrative games, you have to be really careful
because it is hard. I would say out of all
the forms of media, gamers are the hardest to make happy.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah people, It's interesting how protective and territorial and possessive
they get of their intellectual property that they enjoy, isn't it.
It's quite something. I'm sure somebody will do a psycholte
study of it at some point. We're talking with Zach
keillyon He is the proprietor of the Wow Such gaming
(09:06):
YouTube channel, extremely popular, and I want to thank Zach
for being on the show today, for being my video
game expert and talking about Minecraft. However, pay attention to
this programming. Note. We're not done with Zach. I'm going
to have him on my next podcast, and we're going
to talk about his gaming channel, Wow Such Gaming. And
we're also going to talk about zombie movies and his
(09:27):
and mine's favorite zombie movie, Sean of the Dead. So
hit that follow button or subscribe button so that you
get all of our podcasts here and be delivered right
to your device. Thank you for listening. I'm John Wissey
Downy and this is true film fan
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