Always Sunny Star Reveals What Happened to His Minecraft Movie

Rob McElhenney has explained why the animated Minecraft movie he was going to direct ended up not going ahead.

McElhenney, known for playing Mac in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, was lined up to direct Minecraft: The Movie based on a script he co-wrote. It was going to star Steve Carrell and was due to be released in May 2019, but he dropped out in August 2018 with no proper explanation given as to why.

Now McElhenney has revealed his side of the story on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. "I'm comfortable talking about it, because f**k them, at this point," McElhenney began.

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2019/04/16/minecraft-movie-gets-2022-release-date"]

At first, he explains that he loved playing Minecraft with his kids, and got the idea to turn it into a movie after The Lego Movie came out in 2014. "I thought one of the greatest assets of Minecraft is that it didn't have a fixed narrative, that it was an open-world experience," McElhenney said. "And that all you were essentially given were the building blocks to do what you want."

After spending some time at Pixar to refine his pitch, McElhenney went to Warner Bros and met with Greg Silverman, who ended up giving him a budget of $150 million to make Minecraft: The Movie. McElhenney said the theme of his movie pitch was, "people taking agency over their own experience in this digital landscape."

Unfortunately, Silverman left Warner Bros. in 2016 and was replaced by Toby Emmerich, just one month before production was due to begin. McElhenney said that's when his Minecraft movie fell apart. "Toby [Emmerich] who runs the studio there - I dunno if he still runs the studio there - he was actually really gracious. He never actually said 'I don't believe in you' or 'you can't do this', it just slowly died on the vine."

[widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=midseason-tv-2020-34-shows-we-cant-wait-to-watch&captions=true"]

McElhenney said he doesn't "harbour any resentment," as he wasn't Emmerich's choice, and he had a different vision for Warner Bros. But he adds that "the thing that bummed me out was that it was two-and-a-half-years of my life, and I was a month away from moving to Vancouver to start prep. Steve [Carrell] was already locked in, his deal was done, we were making the movie."

McElhenney said he learned a valuable and important lesson, which is that these projects can fall apart at any time, which means "you just have to live in that mystery" when it does. "So you better really, really love the process, and I did enjoy the process, but I didn't love it enough to do it again," he said.

McElhenney has been able to work on and finish a project based on video games since then. Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet is a show about the game industry made for Apple TV that McElhenney and his fellow Always Sunny star Charlie Day wrote together. It's already been renewed for a second season.

As to Minecraft: The Movie, it now has a new director in Peter Sollett, who previously worked on Raising Victor Vargas and Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, and who has written a whole new script for the adaptation. Minecraft: The Movie has a new release date of 2022.

[poilib element="accentDivider"]

Chris Priestman is a freelancer who writes news for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.

from IGN News https://ift.tt/2wAu9Qn
via IFTTT