The Lego Movie had no business being as good as it was. It was such a strange idea for a movie, and it was one that very few expected to be any good. However, the 2014 film ended up being one of the best and most heartfelt animated movies of that year. We’re still upset that it didn’t even receive a nomination for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars.
The film was directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who had previously made a name for themselves with Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street. The Lego Movie would shoot them to even higher heights. It boasted an immensely talented voice cast as well: Chris Pratt, Will Ferrell, Morgan Freeman, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, Nick Offerman, Liam Neeson, Alison Brie, and so many more.
Update July 28, 2023: This article has been updated with recent news regarding The Lego Movie 3.
The success of the first film spawned a number of different Lego movie spin-offs and sequels. For a few years, you couldn't escape the Legos. It seemed like there were new Lego films being announced and released constantly. The last film in the series to be released was The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part back in February 2019. However, it all came to a halt in the early 2020s. The franchise suddenly dried up. So, what’s the hold-up? Here’s what we know:
Initial Success
There’s no denying the success of The Lego Movie. On a budget of $60 million, the film managed to pull in just under $70 million in its first weekend in 2014, and it went on to gross $257 million domestically. When taking its international box office into account as well, The LEGO Movie managed to bring in a massive haul of $468 million dollars. And that doesn’t even account for the massive 12% boost in Lego sales that followed the release of the film. This caused Lego to go over Mattel and make them the largest toy company in the world at the time.
On top of that, the film was instantly beloved by critics and audiences alike. It still has a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Meanwhile, audiences right out of the theater gave the movie an A rating on CinemaScore. The Lego Movie was a big win, no matter which way you looked at it.
The success continued through to the end of the year as well: home video sales of The Lego Movie ended up contributing another $111 million to its total haul domestically. The film was undeniably another pretty feather in the caps of Lord and Miller. The Lego Movie went on to win a BAFTA for Best Childrens Film, in addition to numerous other nominations and wins. Other awards included one Annie for Lord and Miller’s screenwriting. Though it missed a Best Animated Feature nomination at the Oscars, it did receive one for the original song "Everything is Awesome".
The Lego Movie hype was real, and Warner Bros. Animation and the creative team behind the film wanted to strike while the iron was hot. Development immediately began on a sequel and several spin-off films. The Lego Movie quickly built its own little cinematic universe brick by brick.
Failed to Build on It
The first Lego movie to follow the 2014 film was 2017's The Lego Batman Movie, directed by Chris McKay. In terms of the overall reaction to the film, The Lego Batman Movie received a similarly joyous response from both critics and audiences. Some people even argue that the movie is one of the best Batman movies ever produced. The movie centered on Lego's Batman character (voiced by The Lego Movie's Will Arnett), and it wasn’t afraid to dive headfirst into the entire catalog of Batman and DC characters. The Lego Batman Movie also managed to amass quite the star-studded cast: Michael Cera, Zach Galifianakis, Rosario Dawson, Ralph Fiennes, Zoë Kravitz (coincidentally voicing Catwoman five years before she played the character in live-action), Billy Dee Wiliams and Mariah Carey (yes, the Mariah Carey).
Despite the positive reception to the movie, there was a bit of a decline when it came to the box office. Though the budget for the sequel was $20 million higher than the first movie, the total gross dropped to about $312 million globally. The film certainly had and continues to have, its fans. But it’s inarguable that The Lego Batman Movie made a much smaller splash upon its arrival than the first movie did.
This downward trend worsened after a second Lego spin-off was released in 2017. The Lego Ninjago Movie would be the first real flop that the franchise would experience. It was the first in the Lego franchise to be poorly received at the box office. With a similar budget of about $70 million, Ninjago only managed to pull in $123 million worldwide. Taking marketing costs into consideration, it’s likely that The Lego Ninjago Movie failed to break even. On the whole, and despite the quality of The Lego Batman Movie, the franchise’s double-film release in 2017 did more harm than good for the franchise. It became clear that The Lego Movie shtick was beginning to wear thin.
However, the real test came with The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part in 2019. Unfortunately for the series, the film fell victim to one of the worst things a movie can be: just…fine. The long-anticipated Lego Movie sequel was generally considered to be simply OK. This dramatically impacted how it performed overall. Interest in the series had already waned a bit with the 2017 films, but this one opened to a mere $34 million domestically, less than half of what the first film had made in the same February release window five years earlier. It went on to only gross $192 million worldwide on a $90 million budget. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part came and went with little more than a whimper, and this meant the future of the franchise wasn’t as bright as it had once been thought to be.
There are a number of factors for this decline in the box office. Releasing two Lego movies in 2017 might have over-saturated the market. There was a five-year gap between The Lego Movie and The Lego Movie: The Second Part, which is longer than the traditional three-year gap between animated sequels. By that point, the audiences of the first movie might have grown up and didn't want to see the sequel as they perceived it as a kid's movie. Nevertheless, the once-thought-to-be massive franchise was now seen as nothing more than a trend.
What the Future Holds
During the release of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, Warner Bros. Animation was already in development on two other spin-offs for the franchise. The first was The Billion Brick Race, which would have been a Lego racing movie. Already a handful of directors had been involved in the project, but the poor performance of the franchise resulted in the film's cancellation in late 2019. The other film being developed was a Lego Superfriends movie, which would have served as a sequel to The Lego Batman Movie. McKay had worked on the film and implied a script was complete.
In early 2020, Universal Pictures entered a five-year agreement with the Lego Company, which meant they would take the reins from Warner Bros. They would produce and distribute the franchise's future projects. But to this day, there's been nothing but silence. Warner owns the rights to DC characters, so The Lego Superfriends movie was canceled as Universal can't legally produce the movie even if they wanted to. As for the core series, producer Dan Lin confirmed in 2022 that he and Universal are actively developing a new Lego movie.
News came forward recently on July 20, 2023, when it was announced The Lego Movie 3 will be a live-action animated hybrid. The movie will be directed by Aaron and Adam Nee, who previously directed The Lost City. No further details on the plot are known, but it is likely the film will use many of the characters in Universal Pictures' catalog of franchises which would include Jurassic Park, Fast & Furious, Despicable Me, and the Universal Monsters, just to name a few.
Now the question is can the film recapture the magic the first film did almost ten years ago? It is entirely possible. By the time the third movie comes out, there could be a wave of nostalgia for the first film that the studio could tap into, as was the case with the Gentle Minions meme that rose around Minions 2: The Rise of Gru. Lego is a popular brand and can always make a comeback, but the studio should be realistic about if the brand's film heydays might have passed.