Hey, Jack Black is starring in the new Minecraft movie!

But why is this not surprising at all? Jack Black in a video game adaptation? It has to be a day that ends in Y.

Aside from the fact that Black’s casting was announced in January, for most people the first hint of A Minecraft movie exists at all, came on Wednesday, when the Teaser trailer for the film I’m talking about people like my son, who is 16 and played a lot of Minecraft when he was younger. (I may have played my share with him too.)

When he came home from school yesterday afternoon, he said, “Hey Dad, is there a Minecraft movie?” I replied, “Yeah, and Jack Black is in it.” To which he said, “Again!?”

A quick Google Search shows that we are not the only ones who suffer from the not entirely accurate idea that the actor in all of video game movies. Yes, it does seem like Black is in every big-screen adaptation of a game these days, and that’s partly because he’s essentially lent his unique talents to three of the genre’s newest titles: Last year he voiced Bowser in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, last month he voiced Claptrap in Borderlands, and now, in a rather surprising way, he shows up in the trailer for A Minecraft Movie as Steve, the live-action version of the playable character we all embodied while building our amazing constructs in the game. (That Black appears as Steve is unexpected only because Steve isn’t actually a real character in the game—that’s not really what Minecraft is about—and the actor’s outsized personality seems so at odds with what we know about the “expert tinkerer.”)

But aside from those three films, Jack Black hasn’t appeared in any other video game adaptations, so why does it feel like he was there?

This is undoubtedly in part because the actor has turned more and more to family films over the past decade and a half, from the Kung Fu Panda series (which began in 2008 but continued with Part 4 last spring) to the children’s horror Goosebumps to Gulliver’s Travels and, of course, the Jumanji films.

Although not based on a video game, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) and Jumanji: The Next Level (2019) were modern versions of an old favorite, the 1995 Robin Williams film, which certainly holds a certain amount of mental space for many now-adult fans who grew up with the film, which was, after all, based on a Gameif not a video game. Of course, the versions starring Black turned their version of Jumanji into a video game, so even though these movies weren’t based on an actual game franchise, they were video game movies in a way.

Surely Black’s connection to Jumanji is part of the reason for the Mandela Effect, which is “Jack Black is in all the game movies.” Plus, the Jumanji movies offer the game-like experience of their child characters taking on avatars (Black plus Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, etc.) in a video game world that, when you think about it, isn’t all that different from the premise of A Minecraft Movie, although in that movie it seems like the characters in the game retain their real-life form… hence Steve is actually Jack Black.

He’s actually perfect for these kinds of films, a fun and recognizable character for parents to enjoy while they’re stuck watching the latest kids’ cartoon (or semi-cartoon in the case of Minecraft). The little ones seem to like him too, and his harmless cheekiness and sweaty, tireless promotion of such titles should make the studios happy too.

The other interesting aspect of this not-quite-so-far-flung phenomenon is that Hollywood seems to have finally figured out how to make good video game movies. This could mean many more video game roles for Black, regardless of the flop of Borderlands. The Super Mario Bros. movie is getting a sequel, so Black could well return as Bowser and have who knows how many more adventures. If A Minecraft Movie is successful, it’s probably safe to assume that Steve, the actor, will return. And beyond that… the sky’s the limit in the pixel world.

Maybe Jack Black will actually will be in every new video game movie.

Image credit above: Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images