‘Always Sunny’ Star Rob McElhenney No Longer Directing The ‘Minecraft’ Film

Warner Brothers‘ movie adaptation of the video game Minecraft has suffered another setback, losing its second director, Rob McElhenney. As a result, the movie has been delayed beyond its previous release window of May 2019.

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McElhenney, who’s well-known for his work on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, previously said he was looking forward to creating something “stranger and wonderful” with the movie, but he recently told The Wrap that he’s no longer associated with the project. “No, that is not happening,” he said.

Before McElhenney was announced for the film by Warner Brothers and Mojang back in 2015, Stranger Things director, Shawn Levy, was helming the project and was looking to make a Goonies-like adventure. Not happy with that direction, Mojang vetoed the idea and Levy pissed off. He’s now working on the upcoming Uncharted film starring Tom Holland as a young Nathan Drake.

According to The Wrap, brothers Aaron and Adam Nee have been recruited to write the latest iteration of the script, which we still know next to nothing about. The previous draft was written by Jason Fuchs, who also wrote Wonder Woman.

For those unfamiliar with Minecraft, it’s essentially an unlimited box of digital lego where you can build, explore, and craft items in an enormous, procedurally generated world. Whether the movie will take place inside its blocky universe or somehow play out as a live-action film is yet to be confirmed.

The thing is, there isn’t really a story in the game, you’re just kinda given a bunch of tools and left to your own devices, which is a huge part of its appeal. Because of this, Mojang is being particularly vigilant with the script.

“We don’t want any story that we make, whether it’s a movie or a book, to create some sort of ‘this is the official Minecraft, this is how you play the game’ thing,” MojangCOO, Vu Bui, said back in 2015. “That would discourage all the players who don’t play in that way. When coming up with a story [for the movie], we want to make sure it is just a story within Minecraft, as opposed to the story within Minecraft.”

A story mode was released as a collaboration with Telltale Games, but the team is pretty keen to approach the movie differently. I’m pretty damn intrigued by the whole thing, so hopefully, the upcoming film will somehow break the dreaded video game movie curse. If history is anything to go by, though, it’s not likely.


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