A fan puts together an image of what Jason Momoa might look like in the upcoming Minecraft movie.
By ZACK ZAGRANIS | UPDATED 2 DAYS AGO
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Is Jason Momoa a square? Based on a picture posted recently in the r/midjourney subreddit the answer is yes. Redditor u/AlphaMoondog uploaded a picture of The Game of Thrones actor as he might look in the upcoming Minecraft movie, and the results are…interesting.
Credit: Reddit
To be completely honest, the picture looks like Aquaman if the hero traded his signature trident for a hammer made of cubes and his fish scale body suit for a vest made of leather squares. In all fairness, though, it is hard to make Jason Momoa look like anyone but Jason Momoa. The hulking Hawaiian has a distinctive look, after all, much like Steve, the protagonist of Minecraft.
Which begs the question, why isn’t the upcoming Minecraft movie going to be animated? The game features characters and settings made entirely out of voxels–the 3D version of pixels–giving everything a cube shape. Admittedly there is a certain charm to Minecraft’s low-tech graphics, but how will it translate to flesh and blood characters?
That’s the real question, and one it will be interesting to see director Jared Hess answer. There are a few ways Hess could handle the character designs for Minecraft. The cheapest and easiest way would be to follow the above picture and give everyone clothing and tools with vaguely cube-ish features.
While that approach would certainly help keep Minecraft‘s budget down, it’s not very aesthetically pleasing. The Napolean Dynamite director could just digitally cube all the actors. Unfortunately, as anyone who’s ever seen one of those “what The Simpsons would look like in real life” pictures on social media can tell you, the “real life” version of cartoon/video game characters is usually pure nightmare fuel.
Space Jam: A New Legacy
Then there’s the hybrid approach used in movies like Space Jam: A New Legacy, where the human characters are live-action in our world but become animated when they enter the game world. As the Sonic the Hedgehog movies have shown, the Earth people travel to the video game world, and vice versa, is a popular way to do video game movies. There’s a good chance Minecraft will follow suit.
Hess just needs to make sure he doesn’t take any pointers from Adam Sandler‘s failed video game movie Pixels. Pixels featured several characters made out of voxels (yeah, the title doesn’t make much sense) and was a massive failure both critically and commercially. If Jared stays away from any Q-bert-centric love stories, he should be all set.
How to get Jason Mamoa all blocky isn’t even the biggest hurdle for Jared Hess’s Minecraft adaptation. The real challenge will be turning a sandbox game where players can do literally anything (seriously, people have made working computers in Minecraft) into a single narrative. That’s not to say that the game doesn’t have its own lore, but for most players, the story takes a back seat to the hours spent building their version of the perfect Barbie Dreamhouse.
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Minecraft was recently given a release date of April 4, 2025, according to the movie’s IMDb page, so fans still have a while to imagine what the movie will look like. In the meantime, fans have pics like the one above to give them an idea of how things could possibly go.
