Here’s a wonderful Mother’s Day story as Warner Bros./Legendary’s A Minecraft Movie flies past $900M: The entire movie started with a mother’s love for her son, noticing his passion for the create-your-own-world game.
Around 2011, former Miramax and Lorne Michaels Entertainment executive Jill Messick was in between producing gigs (she was an EP on Baby Mama, Mean Girls, Hot Rod and the Oscar-winning Frida), and like many parents with millennial young children, recognized her 11-year old son Jackson’s obsession with the pixelated brick-building universe.
Seeing Jackson’s affinity for the game, Messick was promptly moved to cold-call Stockholm, Sweden-based Mojang Studios to inquire about the movie rights. She then cobbled together frequent flyer miles to fly over and pitch the game’s architect and company founder Markus Persson.
At the time, Mojang — being an indie startup that mushroomed into the creator of one of the world’s most popular video games (last checked Minecraft has sold 300 million copies with nearly 140M monthly active players) — was weary of Hollywood. It was well before the success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Sonic the Hedgehog, and Hollywood and video games didn’t go hand-in-hand as far as successes went; in fact, sometimes a movie could damage a brand.
Messick’s meeting with Mojang went very well, and she returned to Hollywood. She reached out to Gregory McKnight, then with CAA, to update him on her success. McKnight connected Messick with agents Jay Baker (now at Range Media Partners) and Micah Green (now CEO, co-president of film financier and producer 30WEST). There was an immediate eureka moment, as they too had kids who played Minecraft, and they were well aware of and understood the craze behind the 3D-atari-like game. The duo, along with Messick, boarded a plane and returned to Stockholm where CAA would sign Mojang as a client.
The other appeal of Messick to Mojang: She was an indie producer, just like them. Baker and Green put Mojang at ease, letting them know that they’d have ownership in the movie, while elevating the brand.
“The idea of a movie was really early in the process at the time, but when Jill told our son Jackson that she was landing the film rights to Minecraft, he was excited about what his mom might do with the movie,” says her former husband, producer Kevin Messick.
Simultaneously, as Messick was courting Mojang, so was producer Roy Lee and Warner Bros. Production Chief Greg Silverman. For Lee, it was also a passion-pursuit as his kids played Minecraft as well. And it was a slow-going process of five years with a lot of lunches and dazzling Mojang execs with trips to San Diego Comic-Con. When CAA learned of Lee’s pursuit of Minecraft, a suggestion was made that he team up with Messick.
Mojang was promised by Warners and the producers that Minecraft would be a live-action movie, not a hybrid like 2014’s $470M-plus grossing The Lego Movie. In fact, the deal for Minecraft was finalized in February 2014 just as Lego Movie was becoming a sensation. However, the unearthing of Minecraft didn’t end for Warner Bros. right there; Mojang wound up selling to Microsoft in September 2014 for $2.5 billion, hence the pursuit and renewal of the film rights continued. What helped Warner Bros. was that it already had a foot in the door as the company was also trying to pursue the rights to the Microsoft video game Halo.
Minecraft was in development for 10 years with myriad writers and filmmakers, the constant being current Warner Bros. production exec Jesse Ehrman through various administration head changes (Silverman gave way to Toby Emmerich, who was succeeded by Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, the latter who technically greenlit the project). Legendary’s Mary Parent, who has a knack for fanboy properties like Dune and the Monsterverse, was brought on board to propel Minecraft to the next level.
Though her life was cut short tragically in February 2018, Messick’s fingerprints when it comes to the phenomenon of A Minecraft Movie in all of its audience participation glory continued. Warner Bros. and Legendary, in honor of Messick, flew her husband, producer Kevin Messick, and their kids, Jackson and Ava, to the world premiere in London on March 30, which was also Mother’s Day over in the U.K.
Warners and Lee made sure that Messick’s producing credit was honored long after she passed. In a town where success has many fathers, the tale of Jill Messick and the success of A Minecraft Movie is a touching one, showing that Hollywood can have a heart when it counts the most.
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