Fresh off the release of his horrifically received sci-fi movie War of the Worlds, Ice Cube is now helping Minecraft players in a new social media campaign that is at least a lot shorter than his recent film. Weirdly, he’s once again sitting in an office chair looking at a computer in this new ad.
Released last month on Amazon Prime, War of the Worlds was developed and filmed during the height of the pandemic, and it is very bad! It stars Ice Cube as a high-ranking NSA security guy who has to deal with an alien invasion. That sounds exciting, but the movie is shown entirely via computer screens, with Ice Cube struggling to act in front of a webcam for most of the movie’s brief 80-minute runtime. Anyway, now Ice Cube has a new role: helping players who have suffered in Minecraft. I think..? I’ll be honest, I’m not really following what’s going on in Xbox’s new Minecraft ad featuring the rapper and actor.
Cube’s not here for sympathy, just the story.
Send your Minecraft claims to #CubeClaim and @icecube may decide what happens next. pic.twitter.com/X5uhVtBoDh
— Minecraft (@Minecraft) August 14, 2025
On August 14, Xbox posted a new social media ad starring Ice Cube as an insurance claims adjuster for the game Minecraft. Are you laughing yet? Well, the rest of the ad probably won’t help induce any giggles. The idea is that players can send Ice Cube (or perhaps a social media employee at Xbox using Cube’s Twitter handle) clips of them dying or getting hurt in Minecraft, and then he’ll respond with…I don’t know. This whole social media campaign is odd. Does one of the biggest games in the world, that just spawned a mega-popular movie starring Jack Black, really need more exposure on a dying platform like Twitter? I guess Xbox marketing execs think so.
It does make me wonder, though; this is now the second acting role Ice Cube has taken where he just sits in a chair in front of a computer for most of the runtime. Perhaps this is a new request he has for all future roles? Maybe it’s stipulated in his contract? I get it. I like sitting too. And hey, at least this Minecraft ad is shorter and more exciting than War of the Worlds.