Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary made a major casting announcement today, confirming that Oscar-nominated actress Kirsten Dunst has officially joined the untitled sequel to A Minecraft Movie in the role of Alex, one of the most iconic default avatars in the beloved Mojang Studios video game franchise.
The casting comes as something of a full-circle moment. Back in August 2025, Dunst publicly expressed her desire to join the sequel in a candid interview with Town & Country, telling the publication that her kids had loved the original film and adding, with characteristic wit, “Maybe I can just make a movie where I don’t lose money?” Manifesting complete, it seems. Today’s announcement confirms that what started as a charming public wish has now become an official Hollywood deal.
Dunst steps into a role that carries serious weight for Minecraft fans worldwide. Alex is the second of the nine default player skins in the game and stands as the direct counterpart to Jack Black’s Steve, the character who anchors the original film. Director Jared Hess had teased as much even before the sequel was formally greenlit, telling Deadline last year that the Steve and Alex dynamic was essential to where the story needed to go. “It’s Steve and Alex, and so that’s the one that we will be bringing to the table without a doubt,” Hess said at the time. The first film briefly teased Alex at its conclusion, with Kate McKinnon providing the voice in a scene that kept the character’s face carefully hidden. Dunst now steps in to give Alex a full, live-action presence.
She joins a powerhouse ensemble that includes returning stars Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Danielle Brooks, Matt Berry, and Jennifer Coolidge. Hess is back in the director’s chair and is co-writing the screenplay alongside Chris Galletta. Producers on the project include Mary Parent, Cale Boyter, Roy Lee, Eric McLeod, Kayleen Walters, Torfi Frans Ólafsson, Momoa, and the late Jill Messick. Executive producers are Jay Ashenfelter, Jen Conroy, Brian Mendoza, Jon Berg, and Jonathan Spaihts. Plot specifics are being kept firmly under wraps, with Warner Bros. teasing only that details “remain deep in the mine” for now.
For Dunst, the move represents a pivot toward franchise filmmaking at a moment when her artistic credentials have never been higher. The actress has spent much of the past several years working with some of cinema’s most celebrated auteurs, earning her first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. She followed that with a starring turn in Alex Garland’s Civil War for A24 and recently completed work on Derek Cianfrance’s critically lauded true-crime dramedy Roofman opposite Channing Tatum for Paramount. She is also set to appear alongside Keanu Reeves in Ruben Östlund’s upcoming film The Entertainment System Is Down. It is a career marked by an impressive balance between prestige drama and, as Variety noted, populist entertainment, a filmography that stretches from Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette to crowd-pleasers like Bring It On and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy.
The sequel has enormous commercial expectations riding on it. The original A Minecraft Movie, released in April 2025, opened to a record-breaking $163 million domestically and has since accumulated $424 million at the domestic box office alone, finishing as the number one film of 2025 at the domestic box office. Globally, the picture brought in approximately $957.8 million, making it the second-highest-grossing film of 2025 worldwide and Warner Bros.’ third-largest opening of all time. For Hess and his team, that success means a sequel arrives with both a built-in audience and significant pressure to deliver.
There is also a delightfully poetic layer to this particular piece of casting that film fans will appreciate. One of Dunst’s earliest and most memorable big-screen moments came in the 1995 adventure film Jumanji, a story built around a magical game that pulls players into wild, fantastical worlds. A Minecraft Movie operates on a remarkably similar premise, with its characters being yanked through a mysterious portal into the Overworld, a cubic, imagination-driven reality where the rules of ordinary life no longer apply. Decades after Jumanji introduced her to a generation of moviegoers, Dunst is once again stepping into a world where the game itself comes alive.
Warner Bros. Pictures has set a release date of July 23, 2027 for the untitled Minecraft Movie sequel.
