If you’re a Minecraft die-hard, you might have seen one particularly sneaky Easter egg in the new film adaptation A Minecraft Movie — but all is not what it seems. According to Mojang Studios Senior Creative Director of Entertainment and producer on A Minecraft Movie, Torfi Frans Olafsson, that moment that seemed to be alluding to the 2010 Creepypasta story Herobrine isn’t an Easter egg, but a mistake the visual effects team ran out of time to fix.
Warning! Spoilers for A Minecraft Movie follow:
For context, A Minecraft Movie has a scene that takes place at the Woodland Mansion where Henry (Sebastian Hansen) meets an Enderman who puts him in a state where he’s able to see a vision of Steve (Jack Black), except the character is verbally berating him as his eyes go white. Because Herobrine is characterized as Steve with white eyes, fans were convinced that the moment signified that there was a future for the Creepypasta story within the MCU (Minecraft Cinematic Universe, duh).
However, Olafsson has cast doubt on this assumption. “It’s super strange that all of their eyes were supposed to be purple but when it was rendered one of the characters eyes kept coming out white in the final rendered frames so we wound up keeping it like that, because the VFX studio ran out of time,” he revealed on X / Twitter.
In the early Minecraft days, an anonymous poster on 4chan claimed they saw an in-game version of Steve with white eyes and weird powers showing up around the game. Following the post, a Creepypasta story surfaced, which “revealed” that the character anomaly was actually the spirit of a dead player.
Olafsson’s comment is being taken by many fans as a knowing wink to this being a genuine Herobrine Easter egg in A Minecraft Movie. After all, the joke is that it’s an unfixable error, that Herobrine appears and can’t be removed.
We’ve got plenty more on A Minecraft Movie, including how rowdy fans are creating wild scenes in the cinema, causing some to say it’s ruining their experience.
IGN’s A Minecraft Movie review returned a 6/10. We said: “Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess puts a surprisingly specific and funny comic spin on A Minecraft Movie’s kid-friendly adventure, especially in its less antic first half.”
If you’ve seen the film, be sure to check out IGN’s A Minecraft Movie Ending and Post-Credits Scene Explained With Director Jared Hess and Minecraft’s Torfi Frans Ólafsson.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
