Actor Jack Black hits Billboard charts with Steve’s Lava Chicken ditty from A Minecraft Movie
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Steve’s Lava Chicken is the 55-year-old’s second Hot 100 hit from a video game-themed movie.
PHOTOS: REUTERS, WBEI
Derrick Bryson Taylor
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NEW YORK – Do not call him a one-hit wonder. American actor Jack Black made a surprise return to the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the week of May 3 with an unlikely song: Steve’s Lava Chicken, a tune from the hit adventure comedy film A Minecraft Movie (2025), based on the popular video game Minecraft.
The song entered the chart at 78, fuelled by its popularity on short video platform TikTok, where it has been used in more than 280,000 videos. On Spotify, the song has racked up nearly 22 million streams.
Steve’s Lava Chicken is the 55-year-old’s second Hot 100 hit from a video game-themed movie. In April 2023, his song Peaches, from The Super Mario Bros Movie that year, peaked at 56 on the chart, according to Billboard.
What makes Steve’s Lava Chicken so unusual is its length. It is just 34 seconds, which Billboard said set a record as the shortest song in the chart’s 67-year history. It is nearly three minutes shorter than the average length of 2024’s No. 1 hits, according to Hits Songs Deconstructed, a company that provides analysis of hit songs.
Black, a movie star known for playing quirky characters, is also a musician. He appeared in School Of Rock (2003), a film about a failed rock star who pretends to be a substitute teacher, and lampooned heavy metal with the comedy-rock duo Tenacious D alongside Kyle Gass.
A Minecraft Movie, co-starring Black and Jason Momoa, was released more than three weeks ago and has earned more than US$800 million (S$1.05 billion) globally at the box office. Warner Bros Pictures wants to cash in on the craze – and people who want to shout “I am Steve” and “Chicken jockey”.
The studio announced that it would host a “block party” on May 2 at participating theatres, where fans can embrace the film by singing or meme-ing along to their favourite songs and scenes. NYTIMES
