Minecraft 2’s Alex Casting is the Perfect Pay-off to an Iconic Fantasy Movie

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The news has just broken that Kirsten Dunst will be playing Alex (according to The Wrap), paying off her cheeky request to be cast from last year. A Minecraft Movie 2 is now poised to ride the momentum of the first film to even bigger heights, and getting Dunst onboard is a great way to do it. For longtime fans of the actress, this casting will be a full-circle moment: one of Dunst’s earliest breakout roles was in Jumanji (1995), a film about a board game that comes to life in the real world, unleashing a mystical jungle into a quiet suburban town; Jack Black has starred in the franchise’s video game-themed reboot series, with Jumanji 3 alraead set for release in December of this year. If A Minecraft Movie 2 doesn’t have some Jumanji jokes baked into it, they will have failed entirely.

Who Is Minecraft‘s Alex? Explained

Steven and Alex in Minecraft / Mojang Studios

If you never played the Minecraft games, “Alex” was the name given to the second of the nine default skins that Minecraft players could choose as their avatar. Alex came after “Steve,” the original player skin; “Steve” is the character that Jack Black played in the first Minecraft Movie, wherein he was depicted as a human who stumbled into the Minecraft world, and mastered its imaginative building system. It remains to be seen how the film series will adapt her, but Jared Hess has teased that Alex and Steve are very different people in the film, not the interchangeable characters from the game.

A post-credits scene for the Minecraft Movie teased how Alex has been living in Steve’s house while he was stuck in the Minecraft world, and has possibly come into possession of a key artifact: The Ender Chest. That object could take the Minecraft Movie gang to a darker place: “The End,” a dark void realm of Minecraft‘s world, where the “Ender Dragon” roams. The End is the realm that often serves as the last stage of Minecraft, with the Ender Dragon serving as a final boss of sorts, standing between players and a final portal back to the Overworld. Hess has already teased that the post-credits button scene wasn’t just an Easter egg, but rather the hook for the next film. “We teased it in the end credits, and the fans seem to be going wild for it,” Hess said.

The first A Minecraft Movie catapulted past being a successful film release to become a bona fide cultural phenomenon. The film earned nearly a billion dollars ($961.2 million) at the worldwide box office, against a budget of $150 million. More importantly, the film resonated with the generation of Minecraft fans who spent their formative/teen years playing the game.

In fact, A Minecraft Movie struck such a strong chord that showings of the film had to literally get policed, as certain Easter egg moments from the games (“Chicken Jockey!”) became actual disturbances in theaters, with groups of young viewers (or entire theaters!) going so far as to have mass food fights in the theater, to bringing actual chickens in and letting them loose. It was a major migraine for theater owners, but also better viral marketing than WB and Legendary could have ever hoped for.

A Minecraft Movie 2 has a release date of July 23, 2027. What do you think of this casting? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!