150 million investment is not enough. The director talks about the bumpy history of the movie "Minecraft"

Rob McElhenney, the director of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, was once hired to direct the Minecraft animated film, which was a multi-million dollar project that ultimately failed. Now Rob McElhenney has spoken for the first time, talking about how the project slowly went to failure in a podcast.

First, he talked about how lucky he was to be invited to Pixar Animation Studios to meet with senior creative staff, including the team that produced classic films such as A Bug's Life, Wall-E, and Finding Nemo. Rob McElhenney learned all about the process of making animated films.

After returning to Warner Bros. after the visit, he immediately talked to the senior management about the idea of ​​making an animated film based on Minecraft, and believed that the film derived from this open world game was also full of infinite possibilities and did not have to pursue a fixed narrative. Warner Bros. accepted this novel idea and enthusiastically invested $150 million to support Rob McElhenney.

However, after the CEO of Warner Bros. changed in 2016 and Toby Emmerich took over, the latter did not agree with Rob's vision for the "Minecraft" movie. Therefore, as Rob McElhenney was placed and marginalized, the "Minecraft" movie project slowly withered and died.

The actor and director said he had no complaints about the result, saying that this was how the industry worked. But as a big fan of the game "Minecraft", he was very disappointed. After all, after investing two and a half years in researching a film project, no one wanted to see it come to nothing. "Even with an investment of $150 million and such a large budget, the project could still fall apart at any time. Filmmakers have to live in that mystery."

Warner Bros. has found Peter Sollett to replace Rob McElhenney and restarted the entire project. Now the Minecraft movie will tell the story of a teenage girl and her friends defeating the evil Ender Dragon. The movie will be released on March 4, 2022.