And now, a quick PSA on behalf of your local theater workers: Please do not bring a live chicken—or, ideally, livestock of any kind—to your next screening of A Minecraft Movie. Chickens have poor boundaries when it comes to public shitting, and most of them can’t recognize Jack Black in the first place, so it probably won’t enjoy the movie, anyway.
This, brought to you by reports that screenings of the film—which transformed itself, basically instantly, into the most successful movie of 2025 by an increasingly comfortable margin when it came out last week—have been provoking quiet concerns from theater owners, and serious consternation from the people who actually have to clean shit up after an entire auditorium full of 13-year-olds starts tearing their hair out and throwing stuff because Black said the words “chicken jockey.” THR has compiled a bunch of these reports, culled from theater employee subreddits and other forms of social media, and there’s definitely a whiff of “Teens, they sure do cause problems” to some of it. But somebody did bring a chicken, and you shouldn’t bring a chicken to the movie theater. (It feels weird that we have to type that out.) That’s in addition to at least one theater chain (the British Cinemaworld) issuing guidelines to staff for how to deal with possible rowdiness, and a New Jersey theater making headlines after banned unaccompanied minors from seeing the movie.
We suspect this has at least something to do with the way Jared Hess’ film interacts with meme culture, having been laser-targeted at the brains of kids who grew up watching Minecraft videos before they were even old enough to play. (Consider this a secret benefit of having been in development hell for more than a decade, we guess.) The whole film also feels like it’s acting like a strange release valve for the last five years of cooped-up planetary life, as expressed by kids who just really want an excuse to scream their heads off and throw popcorn at a movie screen.
And actually, now that we think about it, a chicken would actually probably be super jazzed about a theater floor covered in popcorn… But no. This way, madness lies. No chickens at the movie theater, kids.
