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Kirsten Dunst has been cast in the upcoming sequel to A Minecraft Movie, months after telling an interviewer she’d love to appear in the film.
The 43-year-old is reportedly set to play Alex, one of the primary avatars available in the Minecraft video games.
Last August, Dunst told Town & Country that she would love to appear in the film franchise because her children had loved the first movie and because the film is likely to be a box office success.
“Maybe I can just make a movie where I don’t lose money?” said Dunst.
A Minecraft Movie was the fifth highest-grossing movie of 2025, opening to a domestic box office of $163 million, a record for a video game adaptation, and eventually grossing nearly $1 billion globally.
Director Jared Hess is set to return for the sequel, along with stars Jason Momoa, Jack Black and Jennifer Coolidge.
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No plot details have yet been revealed for the upcoming sequel, which is expected to be released in July 2027.
The first film followed Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Momoa), Henry (Sebastian Hansen), Natalie (Emma Myers) and Dawn (Danielle Brooks) as they are transported through a portal to a mysterious, imagination-fuelled alternate universe where they end up on a quest with expert crafter Steve (Black).
Despite A Minecraft Movie’s commercial success, the critical reception was far less enthusiastic. The Independent‘s Clarisse Loughrey described the movie as “underwhelming” and argued that “as an adaptation, it’s flawed from the ground up.”
“Replacing Minecraft’s pixelated cast with flesh-and-blood actors is roughly as weird as shooting an entire LEGO film by asking real people to hold imaginary cups in their hands,” she wrote in her two-star review.
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“The result is not the hoped-for creative reinvention à la Chris Miller and Phil Lord’s The Lego Movie, made back in the heady pre-Mario, pre-Garfield days when it still seemed like a stroke of genius to cast Chris Pratt in a children’s animation. Instead, we get a monotonous series of battles between human stars and unnervingly realistic CGI renderings of the game’s various creatures: ‘creepers’, zombies, ‘endermen’, ‘piglins’, etc etc. Supposedly, this was shot in New Zealand. You’d never be able to tell.
“There’s a through line, buried in here somewhere, about how it’s harder to be creative, easier to destroy. Unfortunately, A Minecraft Movie proves its own point. Creativity took too much effort. Easier to destroy the spirit of the video game instead.”
Although it holds a 48 percent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it was a much bigger hit with fans and maintains a strong 85 percent audience score.
