There’s going to be a lot of celebrating tomorrow morning at Warner Bros’s Burbank lot. For the first time since Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice in the fall, the studio has a legitimate box office smash, with A Minecraft Movie blowing past industry expectations to make a whopping $157 million this weekend. That’s more than twice what we predicted earlier this week, but even the most optimistic industry forecasts didn’t expect this to make more than $100 million. It’s now the highest opening for a video game movie ever, beating the $146 million The Super Mario Bros Movie earned in 2023.

This comes along at just the right moment for WB, who have suffered from a huge slate of pricey box office bombs, including Furiosa, Joker: Folie a Deux, Alto Knights, and the recent Mickey 17. Will this be enough to turn around the company’s fortunes? It’s hard to say,...