By The occasional “Barbie” success aside, the ability to adapt a toyline into a successful feature film often doesn’t end well.
One of the few success stories on that front was Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s “The LEGO Movie” which opened a decade ago to very good reviews and strong box-office.
In fact, it did so well that Warner Bros. Pictures rushed forward with numerous follow-ups including “The Lego Batman Movie” and “The Lego Ninjago Movie” followed by “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part” in 2019.
However the big screen offerings involving the building bricks cooled after the latter two titles mentioned above fizzled at the box-office. Titles are still being made for streaming and home video though.
To celebrate the tenth anniversary, LEGO’s head of global entertainment Jill Wilfert tells Variety that LEGO and Universal are still in “active development on a whole range of ideas and concepts”. Even so, she’s aware they oversaturated the market somewhat which is partly why they hit pause:
“In hindsight, we would probably say we had too many films too close together. All those movies did get good reviews. If you even look back to ‘Lego 2’ the reviews were better than the box office might indicate.
I think people that did see it really did enjoy it. But really, in the film industry, it’s tough. I think you have to bring something unexpected to the table.
And for us, going through that timeframe we felt like it was the right time to maybe take a little bit of a pause, re-evaluate what we’re doing.
In addition to the films we also have been very active in the serialized content space, so we continue to create content tied to these properties.
So we really at that point focused on continuing to fuel our franchises with animation and then go into a new space with more of reality style television with “Lego Masters” which has been hugely successful for us.
Wilfert reportedly would not comment on the new Lego Movie film reportedly in the works which has Aaron and Adam Nee attached to direct.
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