The new Minecraft movie has ushered a new era of chaos into Irish cinemas this Easter break with staff and parents alike left scratching their heads at the hordes of screaming children launching popcorn at screens.
A special “Chicken jockey” showing was introduced to Cineworld in Dublin on Sunday afternoon in an effort to contain the disruption seen since A Minecraft Movie opened last week.
Chicken jockey, if you have not heard, is the phrase Jack Black delivers to introduce a baby zombie riding a chicken and is the crescendo for audience participation. The crowd, on the advice of TikTok, parrots him.
Trends develop though, and videos have been circulating of food being launched into the rafters and, in one American screening, a real-life chicken being hoisted aloft. Police escorted some exuberant cinema-goers out of one showing in New York.
The movie, based on the popular video game, has performed strongly at the box office worldwide but it has been generating more headlines due to the antics of audiences.
“Chicken jockey is my favourite scene,” says seven-year-old Luke Redmond, who is at the Parnell Street cinema in Dublin 1 with his sister Rose.
“We had seen the movie before but without the 4DX, [so this was] even better.”
Cineworld staff read a list of rules at the start of business, encouraging shouts and applause but warning against projectile popcorn and any filming on phones. 4DX was made for this sort of experience – clunky jolts and bursts of wind that accentuate anything close to an action scene.
Jared Hess, the film’s director, would argue that theatres generally were made for it. A Minecraft Movie will soon become the first film of 2025 to generate $1 billion at the box office, driven in part by over-the-top crowds. On viral clips of those reactions, Hess recently said he was “just so happy that people are finding joy in going back to cinemas and seeing things as a community, as a group of people”.
“I was so excited for this movie,” says six-year-old Jack O’Brien. “I just couldn’t wait. My favourite part was when [Black’s character] Steve said, ‘You don’t have a knife you’re going to try and stab me with?’ and [the sorceress] said ‘No, I’m too weak’, and then she tried to stab him. Everyone was cheering at the end.”
The plot for A Minecraft Movie is secondary – a comedy-fantasy quest spearheaded by Black and Jason Momoa, both of whom commit painfully to their roles. You could argue it would be difficult to strive for any coherent narrative based on a sandbox game that purposefully avoids a definitive lore, encouraging players to imagine their own version of events.
Instead, there are plenty of gags like the one Jack enjoyed, and a long list of references and Easter eggs for fans. “It’s like a different language,” says Jack’s dad, Alan O’Brien. “When him and his friend Daisy get together, they go into this pretend Minecraft world. The other day we were in the zoo ... Me and my friend were standing there going, what are you actually talking about?”
For a lot of the children attending, this could be a formative cinematic experience – evidence of how an engaged audience can enhance your enjoyment of something individual. Even less optimistically, it shows there is still room for drawn-out action sequences.
“I think it was very good,” says nine-year-old Darragh Morgan, visiting Dublin from Galway for the weekend with his brother Cathal. “It had a lot of action, and it wasn’t just one-sided. Especially with the Minecraft parts, it had the action of the moving [chairs]. So, I felt like it was really good, and I really enjoyed it.”
There was well-placed confidence in the title of A Minecraft Movie, with its indefinite article assuring the world that it was simply the first of many.
If the formula can indeed be repeated, and the same numbers drawn into cinemas, a whole wave of chicken jockeys may be about to arrive.
