Critics hate Jack Black movies – but they keep storming the box office

Dwayne Johnson and Glen Powell haven’t been able to open movies to big numbers this year – but, with ‘The Minecraft Movie’ and ‘Anaconda’, Black has opened two. Have we underestimated his appeal, asks Adam White

Is Jack Black the biggest star in the world? Ask quite literally anyone and they’d probably – and very quickly – say “no”. But the numbers don’t lie: in a year in which major A-listers have struggled to open movies, among them established reliables such as Dwayne Johnson and Julia Roberts as well as nascent stars including Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney, audiences have lined up in droves to see both of Black’s 2025 star vehicles. And it’s even more impressive when both of those movies are comedies, a genre largely shunted out of cinemas, and critically reviled comedies at that.

This Christmas week, Black can be seen in a reboot of the cult 1997 monster movie Anaconda, in which Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube were terrorised by a giant snake. The new Anaconda is more intentionally funny than the so-bad-it’s-charming original, with Black starring as an Anaconda superfan who decides to remake the movie with his best friend, played by Paul Rudd. Venturing to the Amazonian jungle, the pair unfortunately encounter an actual, real-life 25 ft snake.

The new Anaconda has been torn apart by critics, but it’s speculated to gross at least $20m in its opening weekend in the US, which should quickly put it in profit considering its low budget of just $45m. And it could follow a similar trajectory as April’s The Minecraft Movie, which starred Black as a doorknob seller transported into a video game world, and ended up grossing a colossal $958m at the global box office.

Long since removed from his acclaimed, star-making performances in movies such as High Fidelity and School of Rock, Black hasn’t led a live-action movie that’s been a hit with critics since 2017. That was when his other Nineties reboot Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle drew enough positive reviews to eke out a 77 per cent average score on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.

Despite such creative stagnation, his work reliably seems to print money, with Welcome to the Jungle and its 2019 sequel The Next Level collectively grossing nearly $2 billion at the box office (another sequel is due next Christmas). Last year’s Kung Fu Panda 4, the latest installment in a franchise trading largely on his comic persona (in panda form), grossed half a billion. Even his dismal straight-to-streaming 2024 comedy Dear Santa has seen success, with the movie sitting among the most-watched movies on Paramount+ at the time of writing. (An outlier? Last year’s disastrous video game movie Borderlands – but perhaps it might have made money if it placed Black centre stage, rather than asking him to merely voice a robot?)

Flogging a dead boar: Jack Black in the (probable) hit comedy ‘Anaconda’ (AP)

It doesn’t seem to matter that critics have been largely unkind to Black’s recent output, either. Writing in her review of The Minecraft Movie, The Independent’s film critic Clarisse Loughrey lamented Black’s performance in particular, writing: “He delivers lines in the desperate tenor of a clown at an under-attended children’s birthday party.” Still, exit polls in the US suggested that 28 per cent of audiences sought out The Minecraft Movie solely because of Black, suggesting they’d follow him anywhere.

Somewhat unusually, Black this week admitted to paying attention to the success of his own movies. “This is gross and I shouldn’t reveal it, but I like to go on to Box Office Mojo and see how well a film did at the weekend,” he told The Times. “How are the numbers? It’s a f***ing fun game. It’s a competition.”

He’ll be happy about Anaconda at least, which looks set to pull in big figures over the Christmas break and into the New Year – despite threats from the likes of Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Supreme and the Sydney Sweeney thriller The Housemaid. On that note, much has been made of Sweeney’s recent box office woes, but there might be a simple solution: throw her in something with Jack Black, and presumably let the money roll in.

‘Anaconda’ is in cinemas