Here to guide you through the best school holiday viewing at the movies is Steve Newall.
Perhaps it’s time to say so long to summer, but the problem of what to do with the kids during the school holidays never grows old… Well, maybe it does, but at least the Easter break gets a lot more manageable with an array of movie offerings hitting your favourite cool and comfy cinemas.
A Minecraft Movie
If you’re too, um, square to know the deal with the best-selling video game of all time, the Minecraft fans in your fam should quickly see you right. And, if you’ve been confused watching them play (or them watching other people play on YouTube), here comes a big screen experience you can all share in together.
Director Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) headed to Aotearoa with Jack Black, Jason Momoa, Danielle Brooks and Jennifer Coolidge to shoot this tale of misfits transported via portal into a familiarly cubic world.
Dog Man
DreamWorks Animation teams up with Scholastic Entertainment for this animated tale based on the wildly popular (over 60 million copies sold!) Dog Man books (these spinoffs of the even more wildly popular Captain Underpants novels—over 80 million copies!).
After a bomb detonates, a police officer and his canine colleague are saved in surgery by making them a human-dog hybrid. Sworn to protect and serve, this new hero named Dog Man finds a villainous nemesis in an orange feline Petey, the self-proclaimed “world’s most evilest cat.”
Looney Tunes: The Day The Earth Blew Up
Legendary duo Porky Pig and Daffy Duck team up once more in a bizarre alien bubblegum invasion provides the impetus for this sci-fi tinged buddy comedy. When Daffy realises a secret gum ingredient causes consumers to turn into zombies, the race is on to raise the alarm and stop the plan before we’re all popped.
While it’s carefully described as “the first-ever fully animated Looney Tunes feature-length movie created for a cinema audience,” The Day The Earth Blew Up was originally set to premiere on streaming—until it was picked up for successful theatrical distribution in the US by Ketchup Entertainment, who have also just rescued Coyote vs. Acme from oblivion.
Disney’s Snow White
Even if you grew up loving the original Snow White, one of the most influential animated movies ever (and cementing the Disney legacy), getting kids excited about a hand-drawn movie from 1937 remains a lofty goal. Luckily, nearly 90 years later, modern families were in mind for this redo.
Controversies have swirled around the portrayal of dwarfism, the cast’s political views and how they were managed (or mismanaged), and Disney’s Snow White has been a pronounced underachiever at the box office. But kids are not gonna care any more about this any more than the politics of Walt Disney himself during the 1930s…
The King of Kings
You know who kids in 2025 are into though? Yep, Charles Dickens. You know who else? Jesus Christ. I jest, but that’s the framing of this well-timed for Easter animated pic, based on Dickens’ The Life of Our Lord, written for his own children (presumably there’s not a lot of Mary Magdalene to be found here as a consequence).
An all-star cast shows up to voice this mix of Biblical figures and the Dickens family: everyone from Kenneth Branagh to Uma Thurman, Mark Hamill, Pierce Brosnan, Forest Whitaker, Ben Kingsley, Oscar Isaac (as Jesus Christ—obviously).
